Pleiades runs on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, which is due to be updated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux this year. Pleiades is named after the astronomical open star cluster of the same name.” – NASA Does NASA Use Windows or Linux? The system contains the following types of Intel Xeon processors: E5-2680v4 (Broadwell), E5-2680v3 (Haswell), E5-2680v2 (Ivy Bridge), and E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge). This distributed-memory SGI/HPE ICE cluster is connected with InfiniBand in a dual-plane hypercube technology. “Pleiades, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, represents NASA's state-of-the-art technology for meeting the agency's supercomputing requirements, enabling NASA scientists and engineers to conduct modeling and simulation for NASA projects. The image above is a photograph of the Pleiades Supercomputer, the beast responsible for modelling the scenarios for firing humans off our giant rock into space, and hopefully keeping them up there long enough to do their job and return safely back to terra firma. Pleiades Supercomputer - Credit: NASA Archives That’s over a million times more RAM than the AGC. When we compare this to the latest DDR4 RAM, one stick of 8GB RAM is approximately 64,000,000,000 bits. ROM is not able to be changed once it has been written. The Apollo Guidance Computer also had a whopping 72KB of ROM (Read Only Memory), equivalent to 589,824 bits. One single alphabetical character – say an “A” or a “B” – will require approximately 8 bits to be stored in RAM. To round this up in simple terms, the AGC had 32,768 bits of RAM memory. Each of the 2048 words contained 16 binary digits or bits, and a bit could be a 0 or a 1. For the uninitiated, this is referred to as RAM (Random Access Memory). When power was lost, this data was also lost. The AGC had a total of 2048 words of memory which was designed to store “temporary results”. You probably already know that your smartphone is much more powerful than the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) – the computer that took Neil and Buzz to the moon. If you haven’t heard the anecdotal facts about the first moon landings, then you’re going to have your mind blown right now. Luckily, it prompted this worthwhile article, where we’ll look at how far we’ve come with computing in space, and the type of computers used by NASA, Blue Origin and Space-X. If I had been in orbit, that would certainly have scared me a little. Only last week my entire system hung for a good five minutes while Windows 10 told me I had an update ready to install. Somehow, I doubt my PC would be a candidate for space travel.
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