UPDATED 20:20 EDT / OCTOBER 16 2020

EMERGING TECH

Exascale computing brings faster, better operations on Earth and in outer space

In high-performance computing, flops don’t mean failure. The acronym stands for floating point operations, which is the number of calculations that can be done in a second. Today, computers operate at petascale, commonly reaching speeds of 1015 calculations per second.

But we’re about to cross the threshold into exascale, bringing speeds at an order of magnitude that is staggering. Scientists at Hewlett Packard Enterprise predict they will hit speeds of 1018, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second, next year. That’s, count ’em, six commas.

“It will give us a thousand times more computational capability than we have in general today,” said Mark R. Fernandez (pictured), principal investigator for the Spaceborne Computer-2 project at HPE. “We’re struggling with current computers to find solutions as fast as everyone wants them, and exascale computers will help us get there much faster in the future.”

Fernandez spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during Exascale Day 2020. They discussed the implications of exascale computing and HPE’s Spaceborne Computer project, which is building supercomputers for outer space. (* Disclosure below.)

Sending a supercomputer to Mars

Solutions promised by exascale speeds include faster genome mapping and drug discovery (hello COVID-19 cure?), along with more accurate weather predications and climate-change models. And preparing for supercomputing on Mars, HPE’s Spaceborne Computer is taking edge computing to the extreme.

Scientists at NASA’s Mars Mission knew that Earth-bound computers couldn’t handle processing data generated on Mars. And the computers onboard current spacecraft are mostly circa 2007, according to Fernandez. So NASA asked HPE’s high-performance computing team to send a small part of their supercomputer to test if it worked in space.

“I tell people, ‘You wouldn’t want to get in the rocket headed to Mars with a flip phone. You want to take the latest iPhone,’” Fernandez said.

Spaceborne-1 was launched on the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in August 2017 and sent up to the International Space Station. The mission aimed to answer the questions: “Can we package it up to fit on SpaceX? Can we get the astronauts to install it? And can we operate it from Earth, and if so how long will it last?” Fernandez stated.

The answers were all positive, with the computer successfully completing almost two years of tests before returning to Earth in June 2019.

“We were able to get the system packaged for the shake, rattle, and roll — and G-forces — of launch in the SpaceX. We were able to give the astronauts instructions on how to install it and get it going, and we were able to operate it here from Earth and get some pretty exciting results,” Fernandez said. “We produced a trillion calculations a second, which got us into the teraflop range, so first teraflop in space.”

Now Fernandez and his team are working on Spaceborne Computer-2, which will spend three years performing high-speed calculations on the Space Station — the amount of time required to get to Mars and back.

“As long as it works, we’ll keep computing — and computing on the edge,” Fernandez said.

The combination of super speeds and specialized graphics processing units are allowing scientists and engineers to solve missions at the edge faster than ever before. “This heterogeneity of computing is coming together to make humanity a better place,” Fernandez concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Exascale Day 2020. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Exascale Day 2020. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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