The Space Station orbits Earth (and sees a sunrise) once every 92 minutes. Soon it will have a computer that can keep up.
The HPE supercomputer headed to the ISS uses 2-socket “pizza-box” servers from the HPE Apollo 40 family with Broadwell class processors and a high-speed 56 Gigabit per second interconnect. With a speed of over 1 TeraFLOP, while it's not going to give serious competition to the world's fastest supercomputer (China's Sunway TaihuLight), this really is a supercomputer.
You can't just plug this into the ISS's solar-array-charged 48 volt DC power supply. The computer uses NASA-supplied power inverters to feed it the 110AC the computer needs to work.
Cooling the supercomputer was another obstacle. “Typically, an HPE computer similar to this one would be air-cooled. But for the ISS, HPE created (and the astronauts will be installing) a water-cooled ‘locker’ – not your standard datacenter rack enclosure,” says Dave Petersen, the mission’s co-principal investigator for hardware and SGI’s product design and compliance engineer.
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