Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NASA make supercomputer, installed on International Space Station, available for Earth-based scientists

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) built and installed a supercomputer on the International Space Station last year. It was designed specially to tolerate the extreme conditions of space. The company recently announced that it will be making the computer available to earth-based scientists and programmers to conduct experiments.

Technology Officer at HPE, Mark Fernandez, said that the computer was built to withstand extreme travel conditions in space if they plan to go to Mars. Earlier space computers performed some of the calculations in the space and sent the rest of data to Earth for computation. This approach was however not feasible at Mars due to the distance involved therefore a computer was needed that could perform all the calculations in real time without sending any data back to Earth.

Initially they built a one teraflop supercomputer with Intel Broadwell processors - the best available processors – in 2017 and sent it to space via a SpaceX rocket. The computer has flown around the earth 6000 times since.

Now, the HPE and NASA have decided to make this computer available to earth-based scientists, programmers and developers to perform high-latency jobs. The computer would be available next year. Interested people need to apply to HPE and NASA for getting the computer.