[Beowulf] Supercomputing comes to the Daily Mail

[Christopher Samuel]

On 15/08/17 03:12, Jeffrey Layton wrote:

> A friend of mine, Mark Fernandez, is the lead engineer on this 
> project. He works for SGI (now HPE). They are putting two servers 
> onto the ISS and are going to be running tests for a while. I don't 
> know too many details except this.

Ars Technica had more on this last weekend, which I tweeted.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/08/spacex-is-launching-a-supercomputer-to-the-international-space-station/

Two 1TF systems, one to go to the ISS and one to remain on
the ground as a control system, both running the same code.

# For the year-long experiment, astronauts will install the computer 
# inside a rack in the Destiny module of the space station. It is
# about the size of two pizza boxes stuck together. And while the
# device is not exactly a state-of-the-art supercomputer—it has a
# computing speed of about 1 teraflop—it is the most powerful computer
# sent into space. Unlike most computers, it has not been hardened for
# the radiation environment aboard the space station. The goal is to
# better understand how the space environment will degrade the
# performance of an off-the-shelf computer.
# 
# During the next year, the spaceborne computer will continuously run
# through a set of computing benchmarks to determine its performance
# over time. Meanwhile, on the ground, an identical copy of the
# computer will run in a lab as a control.

No details on the actual systems there though.

cheers,
Chris
-- 
 Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
 Melbourne Bioinformatics - The University of Melbourne
 Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545