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Linux Supercomputer starts running in Space, crosses 1 Teraflop speed

The HPE’ s Spaceborne computer was launched in the space using SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft. This collaboration of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and NASA to find out the how the high-performance actually perform in space. This supercomputer is fully installed and running in full capacity in ISS.

This experiment will be carried out for one whole year, which is roughly estimated to be the time taken by the spacecraft to reach Mars. Although the calculations for space research projects are carried out in Earth, the latency is a main issue when it concerns the data being sent from space to Earth and back again.

The supercomputer is built with Apollo 40 server with high speed HPC interconnect running on Linux. It is enclosed inside a water cooled environment and additional software running in the environmental constraints.

The supercomputer itself is a state of the art high performance computer to run at one teraflop. One teraflop is one trillion calculations per second. In other words, it is 30 times faster than a laptop.

HPE’ s America HPC Technology Officer Mark Fernadez says that the engineer is ready to launch the multi-node High-performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark test.

“ Now that all the hardware installations have been successfully completed, it’ s time for me to take over and begin the necessary software downloads and system housekeeping. All goes as planned. The system in space is running identically to its twin on Earth,” Fernandez’ s Captain’ s Log states.

The engineers will study closely about the running processes of the supercomputer and check out the latency and performance of the system.

Tag : Linux
FAQ
Q
What is a supercomputer and how does it work?
A
A supercomputer is not simply a fast or very large computer: it works in an entirely different way, typically using parallel processing instead of the serial processing that an ordinary computer uses. Instead of doing one thing at a time, it does many things at once.
Q
How much RAM is in a supercomputer?
A
There are a total of 299,008 processor cores and a total of 693.6 TiB of CPU and GPU RAM. Initially, Titan used Jaguar's 10 PB of Lustre storage with a transfer speed of 240 GB/s, but in April 2013, the storage was upgraded to 40 PB with a transfer rate of 1.4 TB/s.
Q
What is the speed of supercomputer?
A
Chinese supercomputer clocks in at 33.86 petaflops to break the speed record. A Chinese supercomputer known as Tianhe-2 was today named the world's fastest machine, nearly doubling the previous speed record with its performance of 33.86 petaflops
Q
What processors are used in supercomputers?
A
Supercomputers normally make use of customized compute units (called blades) which usually house multiple nodes (CPUs, GPUs). In the case of the Cray XK6, the most powerful blade in the world, each blade contains four nodes, and each node houses a 16-core AMD Opteron CPU and Nvidia Tesla GPU, and 16 or 32GB of RAM.
Q
Why supercomputers use Linux?
A
No other operating system, specifically Windows gives freedom of customization to this extent. As a consequence Linux can be modified to be used on supercomputers and archive dedicated goals, particularly enhance performance or energy efficiency etc. Today most supercomputers employ a modified Linux kernel.