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.
