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between the radiation the micro gravity

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and the extreme constraints on Power and cooling space is just about the worst

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possible place to put a computer can you

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guys let me in that's better now if you follow space

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research and exploration you probably know that space is just full of

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computers like this one so how do they

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do that well the short answer is by

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replacing them a lot the ISS takes

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regular shipments of dozens of laptops at a time which get and this is great

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this is a direct quote absolutely

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destroyed but not every computer can be

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disposable and in 2017 the madlads at

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Nasa HP Enterprise and kokia who

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sponsored this video collaborated to create spaceborn one the first Edge

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Computing server that was intended to run for an extended period of time on

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the International Space Station of course it being their first attempt

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some uh let's say learning took place and it turned out that the super

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capacitors in the ssds were prone to radiation related failure who knew but

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since all it was ever meant to do was run benchmarks anyway the mission was

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considered a huge success and in 2021

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they launched spaceborn 2 whose purpose was to move Beyond proof of concept and

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explore practical applications for onst compute especially data analysis using

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AI but the story doesn't end there behind me is new space born 2 for

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administrative reasons it has the same name and Core specs as last time but it

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just took off earlier this year and it features more storage than ever over 130

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tabt which is an incredible feat when you consider the design challenges I

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mean where do they even install these things look up oh right I guess they

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don't really need a ladder do they no but you might

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to illustrate why Edge Computing is needed on the ISS let's look at a use

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case that's focused on astronaut safety these are the Eva gloves that the crew

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members wear during space walks and according to this article from 2016 they

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were responsible for half of all space

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suit injuries so to ensure their integrity between you es NASA requires

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the crew to take hundreds of photographs of them from every angle and then beam

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them back to Earth where machine learning is used to analyze them for

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scratches or other hazards except for one small problem that data transfer

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takes five days but with spaceborne oh I

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don't know how about 45 seconds not only

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is this a huge time sa but with only a handful of pictures needing to go to

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Earth for further analysis spaceborn can free up a significant amount of the

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crew's limited network bandwidth for other more interesting things with such

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obvious benefits then you got to be wondering why did no one ever try to put

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a server on the ISS before the short answer is after seeing how the crew

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laptops fared many people thought that they just plane wouldn't work and even

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if they did there were a host of other hurdles to clear like the launch okay

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this is really cool rocket companies like SpaceX and Northrop Grumman have

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Shak test machines that are programmed with profiles that will simulate the

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launch conditions of their respective rockets and if you've seen that viral

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video of the machine that disassembles hard drives by vigorously shaking them

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you're going to know that surviving that kind of treatment is no mean feed well

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these machines Managed IT both in the simulation and in the real world they

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actually lift it off at the end of this January every piece of equipment must

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also pass an acoustic chamber test and a US user friendliness evaluation to

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ensure the station crew can install and manage it and uh oh here's a good one

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apparently all equipment sent up to the ISS goes through what's called a white

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glove test which uh thankfully is not

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what it sounds like basically you put on a pair of white gloves and then you just

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manhandle the crap out of it if the gloves snag or tear on

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anything yeah that's a potential source of injury I'm going to need you to file

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that down which f fun fact they actually do onsite and then repeat the test I

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just hope they weren't filing any RAM sticks speaking of let's take a closer

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look at these machines machine Z cuz it's not just one in here I know it was

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kind of the point of this whole experiment but it still weirds me out

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that these are just bog standard HP Enterprise systems that you could order

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on their site today they don't even have lead armor or anything in this case

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we're looking at an edgeline 4000 which is a multi-blade system and a dl360 dual

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socket server we asked why these specific machines and the answer we got

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was shockingly relatable we sorted the HP server catalog by depth power draw

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and GPU support and these were the ones we were left with all right fair enough

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as for why two different machines well here's the thing in a perfect world

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multiples of the same machine would have been better but due to power constraints

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they chose to have one with more CPU cores for more additional scientific

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applications and one with pure CPU cores

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but with a GPU for deep learning and AI one thing they needed for both however

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is Ample Storage kokia generously sponsored this and brought us out here

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so let's take a look at the let's call them unique choices that they made for

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their storage configurations first up

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obviously gone is any trace of super capacitors so kokia can proudly say that

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their ssds are space ready I guess but

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but what's less obvious is why they chose a SAS interface Drive rather than

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NVMe for their high-speed bulk storage I mean you would think this is Space Age

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Technology they'd want the fastest thing possible but these drives were selected

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for their balance of performance reliability and especially power

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efficiency when you're looking at a shared power budget across two servers

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that is less than a typical gaming rig every single lot counts oh right and

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that's even under ideal conditions at any given time to conserve power for

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other priorities on the station the team can be asked to operate in half power

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mode or even to shut down entirely for large operations like docking so the new

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DL 360 server this guy right here gets

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four 3.72 TB pm6 Enterprise drives

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totaling 120 tabt of raw bulk storage for

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scientific data and for backups then for

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application drives we've got a really wild config again they went with four

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drives but this time it's their RM sixs

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again they're using SAS for lower power but this time two of the drives are

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operating in a data redundant mirror and the other two are basically just

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chilling there ready to be put into action in the event of a failure two

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warm spares out of a four Drive array

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would sound like crazy Paran oia on Earth but I assure you that in space

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where bit flips from random radiation are much more common it's perfectly

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reasonable I mean other than the overkill Drive config and the 28v power

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conversion that they need to run it on the ISS there's not much to say about

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this thing it's pretty much a bog standard server there is one cool demo

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that they said we could run though oh yeah they offered to let us pull one of

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the drives out of this dummy machine and live swap it in into this running

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machine to show that no data loss will occur you want to do the honors sure all

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they asked is that you put it in Bay 8 see you can see the drive is actually operating use Bay s that works look at

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that I mean that's good rm6 that would be bad if it wasn't

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kokia and then let's check the size beautiful 3.8 tab exactly what we want

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they're not the exact drives that are on the space station but we wanted a

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different capacity to show you that it's working and those are expensive

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look at that status rebuilding I mean this seems like a lot of extra steps we

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could have just looked up the light yeah the light yeah it's going

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success and whether you're looking for a SAS drive an NVMe drive high capacity or

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high performance we're going to have a bunch of Kyo has great Enterprise grade

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drives Linked In the description down below I think I'll let you take this one

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apart it's uh appropriately line this size okay let's take a look at the

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second server that's packed into each Locker the el4 ,000 is a blade chassis

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so the servers are basically these

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little slide in cards that yeah I know AR these cute or what wait pull it out

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and they go in on the side look at that

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instead of from the front wow and they

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managed to sneak four kokia xg6 NVMe

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drives into each of these blades well

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when I say each of these blades I should say they had the power budget for four

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drives but they didn't have the power budget for four blades in the flight

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configuration of this system they ship with just one of the four blades

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installed though it should be noted they do fly up a spare blade per system in

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the event of a failure there's just no way that that poor Locker can support

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both these blades and the other server running concurrently let's put you away

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and shift our Focus to the locker now

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obviously there's no real up or down on

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the as it whizzes around the earth at around 28,000 km an hour but to improve comfort

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for the astronauts they tend to mount directional items like plants in a fixed

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orientation which will put our lockers the drawers that hold our servers in the

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ceiling there are two of these lockers each containing an identical system load

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out for workload sharing and redundancy and these lockers present some serious

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design challenges starting with the fact that they use a standard that quite lit

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Lally doesn't exist on Earth Express

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rack to pack the servers in then HP Enterprise had to get kind of creative

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they found the shortest servers they could and then they stuffed them in

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sideways and they're using a combination of air Cooling and water cooling the air

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cooling uses a system on the ISS called AAA so at the back of these lockers

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there's two cold air supplies and then two hot air returns that handles about

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20% of the cooling for the servers op viously 20% not 100% they're going to

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need some more and that's where this water cooling comes in this isn't a one:

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one for how it would be deployed on the ISS for one thing these fittings 3D

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printed mockups real fitting $800 a pop

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if you were even allowed to buy them this tubing cheap vinyl from Home Depot

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real tubing must be made of stainless steel in fact any wetted surface so

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anything that comes in contact with water is supposed to be made out of

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stainless steel but we can still illustrate how it's supposed to work so

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on this side these go into a heat exchanger much like this one this is

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actually from the first generation spaceborn but functionally it's the same

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it pumps cold water into here chills the

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air inside the system and then takes the warm water out to be dissipated to the

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photovoltaic heat exchangers that are plumbed up with liquid ammonia coolant

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and mounted to the exterior of the station to sink that heat into space

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you need these kinds of special heat exchangers because while we think of

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space as cold and we see people you know

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oh blasted out of airlocks and they

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freeze over or whatever in movies the truth is that for traditional methods of

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heat dissipation you need air and in the near vacuum of space well it ain't

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there air get

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it cheesy jokes aside the two cooling systems together are good for removing

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about 400 watts of heat from each locker but that's a combined budget so if this

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GPU server kicks into high gear well

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these CPUs better just chillax for a little bit now let's talk about one of

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my favorite subjects networking there's four standard RJ45 ports on the front of

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the okay I'm going to show you on the real one ah as I was saying four ports

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on each Locker two of them connect both

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of the iss's internal gigabit networks to a separate redundant switch inside

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the locker and then the other two links are going to go between the two lockers

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at 10 GB why 10 gig well because for

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either backups or for multinode workloads that is a heck of a lot better

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than gigabit and the power budget didn't allow for anything faster cool I guess

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I'm starting to notice a pattern here anyway that's all pretty standard but

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things become less so when you look at the station side of these Networks

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cables this is a 37 pin military spec

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locking connector these are designed for power and data but in this application

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just eight of the pins would be used and

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it is $220 for just this part now on the space

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station NASA provides these cables for you but for testing sake really here on

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Earth HP Enterprise had to make their own

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fantastic what's really going to blow your mind though is for all of their

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expensive networking these machines do not have a normal internet connection

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just a private link back to Earth that NASA not only limits to a mighty 1

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megabit per second but that they also encourage folks not to make full use of

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also even now in 2024 it doesn't have

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247 connectivity pretty much every hour

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or two there's a period of downtime that can be anywhere as short as a few

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minutes or as long long as 45 minutes

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and that's because they have to prioritize generating enough power for

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the station and when the giant solar arrays Point toward the sun they can

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block line of sight with the satellites that provide connectivity which oh

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that's a fun fact even though the ISS orbits less than 500 km from the surface

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of the Earth our ping times to the ISS

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and yes we got to Ping the ISS which was

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pretty cool but our ping times were a atrocious reaching nearly a second as we

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uploaded some of the dankest memes that Earth had to offer LT store.com now we

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asked why that is and the answer was twofold one it's really old okay fair

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enough but also too the station's Internet relay is in geosynchronous

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orbit over 35,000 kilm from the Earth's surface and

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uh well what I said was H well there's your problem right there it's just

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really far and you might be wondering well why don't they just use

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starlink that's a good question um someday they might but for now they

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don't and HP and the team on the ISS have to work around the constraints of

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the current setup I mean for crying out loud it took them four years to validate

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that you know we can even just run a normal computer up here and actually

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expect this thing to be reliable they can't just switch to something and go I

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don't know I hope it works um oh by the way here's another fun one there's no

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API to determine if if their connection is up or down so instead what they do is

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buffer all their Communications in basic terms that means that they ping every

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second and if the ping succeeds they send data and then hope that the

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connection stayed up during that time it's a pretty good system okay not a

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perfect one but certainly enough for us to learn a lot from the spaceborn

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project even though spaceborn 2 has been in action for 3 years there's still so

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much to learn two of the servers have hard Hardware raid cards for their

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drives for example costing both mass and power consumption while two of them use

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software raid which obviously doesn't consume any Mass but could impact power

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consumption even more depending on the loads and one of them could be more or

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less reliable than the other we won't know until we try which is kind of a

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recurring theme here so if you want to learn more about the spaceborn computer

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project we're going to have some resources linked for you down below and

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we're also going to have a L to some great Enterprise storage options from

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our sponsor kokia we're truly grateful for this unique opportunity to get

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realistically as close as I ever will to the real ISS a prop in a sound stage in

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LA but hey thanks kogia for the opportunity and for your long-term

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partnership