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The International Space Station will soon receive powerful artificial intelligence, cloud and edge computing tools from HPE and Microsoft Azure to expand technology experiments intended to prepare NASA for the launch of future manned exploratory missions to Mars.
The new equipment and software, including HPE’s specialized second-generation Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2), will mark the first time that extensive state-of-the-art computing and artificial intelligence capabilities will be available to space station researchers, Tom Keane, vice president of Microsoft. Chairman of Azure Global, he wrote in a Feb. 11 post on the Azure blog.
The new hardware, software and services are scheduled for launch to the ISS at 12:36 pm on February 20 aboard Northrop Grumman’s Commercial Refueling Services 15 (NG-15) cargo mission. NASA contracts to launch the NG-15 mission from the Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, to bring in the necessary supplies.
The new SBC-2 computer heading to the space station follows the original Spaceborne Computer-1 that was sent to the ISS in 2017 as part of a validation study to test it in the rigors of space aboard the orbiting laboratory. SBC-1 returned to Earth in 2019 after completing its mission. Both Spaceborne Computer-1 and Spaceborne Computer-2 are sponsored by the ISS National Laboratory.
SBC-2 will provide ISS researchers with a wide range of new capabilities that they did not have with the original Spaceborne machine from 2017 to 2019, said Dr. Mark Fernandez, solutions architect for converged edge systems at HPE and principal investigator for SBC. -two. HPCwire brother site EnterpriseAI. Technological advancements in AI, the cloud and more will provide more possibilities in the new machine for the ISS researchers, he said.
“On the hardware side, we are shipping the HPE Edgeline Converged EL4000 Edge System, which is specially designed and built to operate on the edge and take advantage of AI and ML capabilities with its integrated Nvidia T4 GPUs,” said Fernandez. “These are enterprise-class, off-the-shelf commercial servers that go into data centers.”
With CPU and GPU
Edgeline EL4000 servers will use Nvidia T4 GPUs for artificial intelligence and machine learning, image processing, video processing, and other tasks. Previously, the first SBC-1 used CPUs for these tasks. The latest SBC-2 will include both CPUs and GPUs to allow for comparison performance experimentation in the space.
The 1U boxes fit into standard 19-inch racks for data centers on the ISS. The shelves are then inserted into the lockers on board the ISS to hold them securely. An enterprise-class compute node, HPE’s ProLiant DL360, is also provided for intense compute requirements, Fernandez said.
For the second-generation SBC, NASA asked HPE to send twice the computing power of the original version, Fernandez said. “So we are shipping twice as many servers. You’ll see two lockers, each containing two servers. “
“One is a CPU-based Intel server for those who love Intel and traditional computing, and we will have a GPU-based Edgeline server for those who are doing image processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and so on,” said Fernandez.
NASA requested double the computing power on the SBC-2 so the agency can continue its work to send humans to Mars, he said. SBC-1 was a proof-of-concept device for 18 months and now the new SBC-2 will be tested to see how it reacts to two to three years in space to accommodate a mission to Mars, he added.
Azure in space
Azure’s cloud capabilities will be used with the machines to enable experiments with the transfer of data from the ISS to Earth in the fastest and most efficient way possible, Fernández said. These data transfers are done today using existing NASA technologies.
“The ISS is only 220 miles in Earth orbit, but the network is around 1980,” Fernández said. “We have speeds of two megabits per second up and down to the ISS. I have 50 megabits per second in my house. “
Increasing those speeds will be critical for missions to Mars, he said.
“Microsoft is enabling that, and they have aspirational plans to develop some artificial intelligence and machine learning that we will see,” Fernandez said. One idea they’ll look at is running data on SBC-2 and then sending small amounts of data back to Earth, and then comparing it with burst data to Azure and seeing what works faster.
“We are sitting on top of the same NASA network, but we are going to encode and compress messages back and forth to get the most out of those two megabytes per second,” he said. “I have a brilliant scientist who is going to run the same experiment on CPU, GPU, and in the cloud. And he will inform the community, if he has this type of data, it is better if he processes it this way because we have those three options. “
The experiments will begin after the equipment arrives at the ISS and after its installation and configuration. Those tasks are expected to take some time to complete, including several days for the cargo mission to reach the space station. “We have three prepackaged experiments for three different users that we hope to be able to do immediately,” Fernández said.
How Azure views its mission aboard the ISS
“The crux of this work is making the capabilities of Azure available to astronauts, space explorers and researchers to learn and advance science and the use of the cloud to support their goals,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. EnterpriseAI. “Through this project, we will be able to continue to gain knowledge on how we can better support the scientific and research community, wherever they are, on and off the planet.”
With SBC-2, Microsoft’s research and Azure space engineering teams are “evaluating the potential of HPE [space-based] cutting edge processing along with hyperscale Azure, along with the development of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning models to support new insights and research advances, ”said the spokesperson.
That includes meteorological modeling of dust storms to enable future modeling of missions to Mars, plant analysis and hydroponics to support the growth of food and life sciences in space, and medical imaging experiments using ultrasound in the ISS to support astronaut health care. A platform is also being created for the development and testing of hybrid edge-cloud environments before contributing additional experiments to the ISS.
“We are exploring the potential to power new and exciting experiments that harness the far-reaching potential of the cloud in conjunction with the capabilities of HPE Edge,” the spokesperson said. “To date, researchers have often had to limit the scope of their study to the computational resources available to them to conduct their research.”
The use of blast capabilities with Azure will add to future capabilities, according to Microsoft. “Downloading to the cloud provides access to more computing resources than can be accommodated on the ISS, while taking advantage of the power and proximity of SBC-2 at the edge,” the spokesperson said. “We are excited to empower others, including in space, to harness the power of Microsoft Azure, enabling astronauts, space explorers and researchers to think big while tackling their toughest questions.”
