from the Robbie-the-Robot-had-solved-this-problem-in-1956 dept.
Back in 2017 two high-powered GNU/Linux computers were sent into orbit and are still running. They are long overdue for retrieval but are, more than 530 days later, still working. The goal of the project was to test the durability of such systems in preparation for travel to Mars, where data must be processed on site because of the delay in sending it to Earth and then transmitting the results back to Mars. So far autonomous management software has handled all of the hardware problems.
The servers were placed in an airtight box with a radiator that is hooked up to the ISS water-cooling system. Hot air from the computers is guided through the radiator to cool down and than circulated back.
Mr Kasbergen said there had been problems with the redundancy power supply as well as some of the redundant solid-state drives.
But he said the failures were handled by the autonomous management software that was part of the experiment.
The devices will need to be inspected back on Earth to find out what went wrong.
Earlier on SN:
Supercomputer on ISS will soon be Available for Science Experiments (2018)
HPE "Supercomputer" on the ISS Survives for 340 Days and Counting (2018)
HPE Supercomputer to be Sent to the ISS (2017)
Related Stories
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is sending a supercomputer to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX's next resupply mission for NASA, which is currently set to launch Monday.
Officially named the "Spaceborne Computer," the Linux-based supercomputer is designed to serve in a one year experiment conducted by NASA and HPE to find out if high performance computing hardware, with no hardware customization or modification, can survive and operate in outer space conditions for a full year – the length of time, not coincidentally, it'll likely take for a crewed spacecraft to make the trip to Mars.
Typically, computers used on the ISS have to be "hardened," explained Dr. Mark Fernandez, who led the effort on the HPE side as lead payload engineer. This process involves extensive hardware modifications made to the high-performance computing (HPC) device, which incur a lot of additional cost, time and effort. One unfortunate result of the need for this physical ruggedization process is that HPCs used in space are often generations behind those used on Earth, and that means a lot of advanced computing tasks end up being shuttled off the ISS to Earth, with the results then round-tripped back to astronaut scientists in space.
HPE supercomputer is still crunching numbers in space after 340 days
HPE's mini supercomputer launched into space last year has survived the harsh conditions of zero gravity and radiation for almost a year. The Spaceborne Computer isn't the greatest supercomputer and has a performance of one teraflop, runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is built out of two HPE Apollo Intel x86 servers with a 56Gbps interconnect.
NASA wanted to see if a computer would last for a year - roughly the time it takes to reach Mars - inside the International Space Station (ISS). So, HPE offered to tuck its Spaceborne Computer aboard SpaceX's CRS-12 rocket and send it into the abyss. "It has now been in space for 340 days", said Mark Fernandez, America's HPC technology officer at HPE and co-principal of the experiment, during a panel talk at the ISS Research & Development Conference on Wednesday in San Francisco.
[...] The machine hasn't been radiation hardened, and relies on a few software tricks to stop it from corrupting, something Fernandez calls "autonomous self-care". Continuous health checks helps keep the computer in check, and when it detects any potential hardware failures, it runs at a slower pace or enters "idle mode", where it powers down.
Previously: HPE Supercomputer to be Sent to the ISS
Related: Rodent Research-9 Experiments Sent to the ISS
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Astronauts will soon be able to use a supercomputer to help run science experiments on the International Space Station. The Spaceborne Computer, a joint project between NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, launched to the ISS in 2017. It’s been limited to running diagnostic tests, figuring out how well a computer built for Earth could survive in space.
Now it will be available to process data for space-based experiments, which should save researchers on the ground valuable time. It will also save precious bandwidth in the tightly-controlled stream of data that NASA manages between the ISS and the ground. The exact experiments that the supercomputer will run in the next few months have not yet been disclosed.
Source: A supercomputer on the ISS will soon be open for science experiments
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @02:09PM (22 children)
Linux servers don't care where they are. 530 days? I envy them because they have a more stable power supply than I have. I seldom go 100 days without a power outage. How many Linux machines on earth have gone thousands of days without crashing?
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @02:14PM (6 children)
6030 days 5 hours 21 minutes 19 seconds on the screen shot here - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/03/epic-uptime-achievement-can-you-beat-16-years/ [arstechnica.com]
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 03 2019, @02:32PM (3 children)
The trick to get long uptime:
Step 1: Boot the system.
Step 2: Suspend to disk.
Step 3: Wait. The longer you wait, the larger your uptime.
Step 4: Bring your system back up.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @04:37PM (2 children)
It's probably possible to get it by fucking with the system clock too... Why anybody would want it I do not know.
I personally install kernel updates that on my OS do require restarting. Of course in an environment like aboard the ISS that's something you don't want.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 03 2019, @10:15PM (1 child)
I also don't see why someone would want to fuck with the system clock. On the other hand, there are good reasons why one would want to suspend to disk.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 04 2019, @04:14PM
You mess with the system clock for games that use it for things like seasonal events or the like. That you don't have to wait until October to get all those cool Halloween Costumes in Terraria.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday March 03 2019, @09:49PM
Ahhh, Netware 3.12. Thank you for that link. Brings back really good memories. I built dozens of them in that time period. For all I know some of them still run, but I doubt it because stuff gets depreciated and tossed.
The fact that one had over 6,000 days uptime says it all. Of course that means the hardware had to survive that long, and obviously it was built before the not so great capacitor plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague [wikipedia.org].
Netware is so different from the rest it felt like you were doing something on a significantly different and higher level. It was crazy efficient too. I think the elevator seek was a big factor. It would do RAID 0 natively if you were okay living dangerously. Under heavy loads, watching the HD lights and hearing the head actuators moving in that coordinated rhythm was musical. I shipped a couple of them before we started using hardware RAID 5 controllers. Novell did issue a lot of patches over the years- that annoyed me, but it got me ready for the coming onslaught of Windows patches.
BTW, in that article about the 6,000+ day uptime they were worried about the HD's bearings, but I'd bet they were okay. I remember those days well, and still have a couple of full-height 5.25" drives. It's not the bearings- the spindle motor is _very_ noisey. Sounds like something grinding, but it's partly the motor's size and current due to the rotational size / inertial mass, and the likely square wave drive that would create harsh harmonics. Brand new they always sounded like they had cube instead of ball bearings- Maxtor, WD, HP, etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:38PM
Also depends on the hardware, for things like Tandem and Stratus systems the uptime is typically "since it was first plugged in". There's a company I know who were still, the last time I heard, running a Tandem CLX. It ran through the Loma Pieta earthquake, among other things.
(Score: 4, Touché) by maxwell demon on Sunday March 03 2019, @02:28PM (6 children)
Throw one into the ocean, and you'll learn how wrong you are.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @03:11PM (3 children)
Soon enough we will https://singularityhub.com/2018/03/25/watch-this-lifelike-robot-fish-swim-through-the-ocean/ [singularityhub.com]
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 3, Funny) by linkdude64 on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:23PM (2 children)
Nice fish, but can it run DOOM?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @11:34PM (1 child)
I'll have to capture one to find out. I guess that means a net? They're not going to bite on a surf casting rig. A speargun is too destructive. Ditto dynamite. Nets. Nets are hard work though, and I'm getting old, fat, and lazy.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday March 04 2019, @12:34AM
Get him a beer and TMB will catch it for you.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday March 03 2019, @08:42PM (1 child)
https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]
k now what?
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @09:27PM
now what? Get one of these - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=megGOXIJBEE [youtube.com] Have you looked at those screens?
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @02:31PM
Why didn't they use Windows servers? Oh... it would have infected the ISS due to a dll incompatibility problem and reversed the toilet flow, thinking the toilet was an air conditioner.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @03:32PM
radiation is much stronger in space, and regular hardware does funny things unless shielded:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error#Cosmic_rays_creating_energetic_neutrons_and_protons [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by physicsmajor on Sunday March 03 2019, @03:34PM (5 children)
Not sure if you're being serious, but the real reason for this is that really advanced technology - especially modern RAM, to a lesser extent the CPU/GPU dies and SSDs - are highly susceptible to radiation. And there's a lot of that in orbit, with way more beyond the Van Allen belts (so any mission to the Moon or Mars will have a bunch of it to deal with). Up until now, the actual flight computers have been incredibly simple and based on OLD tech, both slower but also larger parts are less susceptible. This was to determine if we can properly harden more modern stuff.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 03 2019, @04:05PM (4 children)
I was less than half serious - but there is some serious there. For the most serious part, the environment means nothing at all to the OS. Linux just doesn't care if some part of the hardware dies a fiery death, so long as the most vital portions of the hardware survive. The rest of the seriousness stems from the fact that a vital piece of hardware, such as navigation computers, can certainly be contained within a shielded bit of the spaceship. It's pointless and stupid to suppose that a ship can be swathed in a quarter inch of lead, but they can certainly install a lead box large enough to shield a typical EATX server board. For the rest, it's just snark.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 4, Informative) by physicsmajor on Sunday March 03 2019, @04:17PM (2 children)
There's only so much you can do in terms of shielding. Alpha and beta particles you can shield against, but the worst of them emit secondary photons which can be difficult. High-energy gamma bursts are frequent enough to be considered common and must be designed for - there is no way to shield against that in any practical method we have available (you'd need thousands of tons of lead surrounding everything, and even then would merely reduce not eliminate. Then we have neutrons. Those penetrate most stuff rather well with water the easiest shield we've got. It's even less feasible to have both huge water and huge lead shields.
So short of perhaps lassoing a big asteroid and putting your stuff in the very middle before you leave, which isn't feasible given current tech, these events are going to bake your computers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Monday March 04 2019, @08:41AM (1 child)
There's more to cosmic rays [wikipedia.org] than just alpha, beta, and gamma rays (Helium nuclei, electrons, and high-energy photons), and they can have energies far higher than radioactive decay events (there is a nice graph of cosmic flux against particle energy iin the article), which means that what you might think of as adequate shielding on Earth against typical radioactive decay produced 'rays' isn't anywhere near enough when beyond the atmosphere, which by its very bulk shields us from a lot of nasties - that and the magnetosphere.
As an illustration, there are ultra-high energy cosmic rays and extreme-energy cosmic rays with energies exceeding the "so-called Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit (GZK limit). This limit should be the maximum energy of cosmic ray protons that have traveled long distances (about 160 million light years), since higher-energy protons would have lost energy over that distance due to scattering from photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). [wikipedia.org]"
A well known exemplar is the Oh-My-God particle [wikipedia.org]:
If one of those hits your CPU or DRAM, it's not going to do a lot of good. If you want to design for seriously long uptime in space, your architecture needs to be able to cope with high-energy cosmic radiation, probably by having a certain minimum size of critical features, and also duplicating features so they can run in resilient/redundant groups such that knocking one out of operation doesn't stop things from working. You also need to think about how data is protected when in use - memory buses and other internal data transfer components are not magically immune from the effects of cosmic radiation, so having the means to detect errors while it is in memory, in the cpu, in long term storage and at all points in-between is necessary. If your life depends on a bit not being flipped when it shouldn't be by a capricious cosmic ray, a whole system approach is needed.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday March 04 2019, @08:42AM
Link for the blockquote above: http://www.cosmic-ray.org/reading/flyseye.html#SEC10 [cosmic-ray.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @04:46PM
I've had a soundcard disappear from a mobo. Linux didn't give a damn, just stopped loading the corresponding sound modules automatically. :)
Easier than plug&play. It was a dying mobo of an old laptop that sometimes froze the system. Otherwise it worked fine outside first the freezing and then the soundcard getting fried. It was a HP laptop so it was full of dust and impossible to clean, the fan was literally the last component to come off in disassembly. 18 different types of screws if memory serves...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @05:06PM (1 child)
i am sure if we meet paying aliens that are mildly smarter then we that windows will start running on outer space computer, barely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @07:00PM
There is a Star Trek joke about them disabling the Borg by sending them Windows....
Linux Servers Stranded In SPACE. - good headline!
Options from here:
* toss them out to float down on their own - Linux are tough!
* call Elon M. and he can beam to them a refreshed Linux image - for the heck why not of it
* Pop them on board the handy-dandy just-arrived Elon X capsule - go ahead & chance it
(Score: 0, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday March 03 2019, @06:43PM (1 child)
Now maybe they'll find the EMAILS.
I'm joking. Obviously I'm joking here. I’ve learned because with the Fake News, if you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience, if you’re on live television with millions of people and 25,000 people in an arena and if you say something like "Russia please, if you can, it is Hillary Clinton’s EMAILS! Please, Russia, please! Please, get us the e-mails! Please!" So everyone is having a good time, I’m laughing, we’re having fun and then that fake CNN (and others) say, "oh, he asked Russia to go get the EMAILS. Horrible!" I mean, I saw it like two weeks ago. I’m watching and they are talking about one of points. He asked Russia for the EMAILS. These people are sick and I’m telling you, they know the Game. They know the Game and they play it dirty. Dirtier than anyone who’s played the game. Dirtier than it’s ever been played. So crooked!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 03 2019, @06:56PM
Not just the crooked media, it looks like RUSSIA also took that speech seriously. They found the emails. And published them. And talked with your besties Roger, Jared and Paul. Some joke!
(Score: 3, Touché) by stretch611 on Sunday March 03 2019, @09:00PM
It seems to be a perfect environment for Windows... Deep Space out of contact from the internet... even windows *might* be able to avoid getting a virus under those conditions.
Oh, right... they won't work without being able to phone home :(
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P