Earlier this year, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NASA sent a new edge computing system to the International Space Station (ISS) and it has now successfully completed its first space experiment.
In 2017, HPE and NASA demonstrated for the first time that a ready-to-use commercial computer could survive a launch into space, be installed by astronauts, and successfully operate on the ISS with the Spaceborne Computer-1.
In February, HPE decided to build on this success by shipping its new Spaceborne Computer-2 to the ISS. This new system, which is committed to the HPE Edgeline EL4000 Converged Edge System and the HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 Server, differs from its predecessor by the fact that it is an edge computing platform specifically designed to operate in the harsh environment of space.
Spaceborne Computer-2 was successfully installed in April and offers twice the computing performance of its predecessor, while bringing AI capabilities to space for the first time. With these new capabilities, astronauts will be able to advance space exploration and research, as they can take advantage of the same programming models and development experiences that are used on Earth.
(Image credit: NASA)
Solving the bandwidth problem
The HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 supports the maximum available network speeds, but the system only receives two hours of NASA communication bandwidth each week to transmit data to Earth with a maximum download speed of 250 Kbps.
While HPE researchers may compress data in Spaceborne Computer-2 before sending it to Earth or analyzing data collected in space to free up bandwidth, some investigations require more compute or bandwidth than the system can provide. . For this reason, the company decided to apply its vision of an ‘edge to cloud’ experience in which the system is used to perform preliminary analysis or filtering on large data sets, extract the important bits, and then send these results to the Earth, where it will be analyzed in the public cloud.
To test this theory, the Azure Space team at Microsoft devised an experiment in which the health of astronauts is monitored in the presence of increased radiation found in space. Using a gene sequencer aboard the ISS and Spaceborne Computer-2, astronauts aboard the ISS were able to perform the initial process of comparing extracted gene sequences with reference DNA segments in space and only the differences. were sent to the HPE ground station. Back on Earth, this data was uploaded to Azure, where the Microsoft Genomics service was used to compare these differences to the entire human genome.
On August 12, the experiment was successfully carried out when a 120MB payload of data developed by Azure Space and required to complete the experiment was uploaded to the ISS and run on Spaceborne Computer-2. This experiment has shed light on how an edge-to-cloud computing workflow on board the ISS can be used to overcome computing and bandwidth limitations.
Now that Spaceborne Computer-2 has been successfully installed and tested on the ISS, it is to be hoped that further innovative experiments will be carried out in the future. In fact, there are four experiments underway at the moment with another 29 more already lined up.
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