 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Exascale Day, made possible by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. We're back at the celebration of Exascale Day. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome two great guests. Brian Dansbury is here. He's with the ISS program science office at the Johnson Space Center. And Dr. Mark Fernandez is back. He's the America's HPC technology officer at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, well, thanks for coming on and Mark, good to see you again. And Brian, I wonder if we could start with you and talk a little bit about your role at the ISS program science office as a scientist. What's happening these days? What are you working on? Well, it's been my privilege the last few years to be working in the research integration area of the space station office. And that's where we're looking at all of the different sponsors, NASA, the other international partners, all the sponsors within NASA and prioritizing what research gets to go up to station, what research gets conducted in that regard, and to give you a feel for the magnitude of the task. But we're coming up now on November 2nd for the 20th anniversary of continuous human presence on station. So we've been a space-faring society now for coming up on 20 years. And I always like to point out because as an old guy myself, it impresses me. That's 25% of the US population. Everybody under the age of 20 has never had a moment when they were alive where we didn't have people living and working in space. So, okay, I got off on a tangent there, we'll move on. In that 20 years, we've done 3000 experiments on station and the station has really made a miraculous sort of evolution from a basic platform to what is now really a fully functioning national lab up there with commercially run research facilities all the time. You can think of it as the world's largest satellite bus. We have four or five instruments looking down, measuring all kinds of things in the atmosphere during Earth observation data, looking out, doing astrophysics research, measuring cosmic rays, x-ray observatory, all kinds of things. Plus, inside the station, you've got racks and racks of experiments going on, typically scores, if not more than 50 experiments going on at any one time. So, the topic of this event is really important to us at NASA, data transmission up and down, all of the cameras going on on station, the experiments, one of those astrophysics observatories has collected over 15 billion impact data of cosmic rays. And so the massive amounts of data that needs to be collected and transferred for all of these experiments to go on really hits to the core. And I'm glad I'm able to be here and speak with you today on this topic. Well, thank you for that, Brian. Of course, there's a baby boomer, right? We're up with the national pride of the moon landing. And of course, we saw the space shuttle. We've seen international collaboration and it's just has always been something, you know, part of our lives. So thank you for the great work that you guys are doing there. Mark, you and I had a great discussion about exascale and kind of what it means for society and some of the innovations that we can maybe expect over the coming years. But I wonder if you could talk about some of the collaboration between what you guys are doing and Brian's team. Yeah, so yes, indeed. Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. That was a great introduction, Brian. I'm the principal investigator on Spaceborne Computer 2 and as the two implies, there was one before it. And so we've worked with Brian and his team extensively over the past few years to get high performance computing onboard the International Space Station. Brian mentioned thousands of experiments that have been done to date and that there are currently 50 or more going on at any one time. And those experiments collect data. And up until recently, you've had to transmit that data down to earth for processing. And that's a significant amount of bandwidth. So with Spaceborne Computer 2, we're inviting payload developers and others to take advantage of that onboard computational capabilities. You mentioned exascale. We plan to get to exascale next year. We're currently in the era that's called petascale. And we've been in the petascale era since 2007. So it's taken us a while to make that next leap. Well, 10 years after Earth had a petascale system in 2017, we were able to put a tariff flop system on the International Space Station to prove that we could do a trillion calculations a second in space. That's where the data is originating. That's where it might be best to process it. So we want to be able to take those capabilities with us. And with HPE acting as a wonderful partner with Brian and NASA and the Space Station, we think we're able to do that for many of these experiments. It's mind-boggling when you think we were talking about I was talking about the moon landing earlier and the limited power of computing power. Now we've got water-cooled supercomputers in space. I'm interested, I'd love to explore this notion of private industry developing space-capable computers. I think it's an interesting model where you have computer companies can repurpose technology that they're selling at obviously greater scale for space exploration and apply that supercomputing technology instead of having government fund proprietary purpose-built systems that are essentially uni-use case, if you will. So Brian, what are the benefits of that model that perhaps you wouldn't achieve with governments or maybe contractors kind of building these proprietary systems? Well, first of all, any tool you're using, any new technology that has multiple users is going to mature quicker. You're going to have greater features, greater capabilities, not even talking about computers, anything you're doing. So moving from government as a single user to off-the-shelf type products gives you that opportunity to have things that have been proven. The technology is fully matured. Now, what had to happen is we had to mature the space station so that we had a platform where we could test these things and make sure they're going to work in the high-radiation environment. And they're going to be reliable because first you've got to make sure that safety and reliability are taken care of. So that's why in the space program you're going to be behind the times in terms of the computing power of the equipment up there. First of all, and foremost, you needed to make sure that it was reliable and safe. Now, my undergraduate degree was in aerospace engineering and what we care about as aerospace engineers is how heavy is it, how big and bulky is it? Because it's expensive. Every pound I once visited Gulfstream Aerospace and they would pay their employees $1,000 if they could come up with a way of saving one pound and building that aircraft. That means you have more capacity for flying. It's only orders of magnitude more important to do that when you're taking payloads to space. So particularly with Spaceborne Computer, the opportunity there to use software and check reliability that way without having to make the computer radiation resistant, if you will, with heavy, bulky packaging to protect it from that radiation is a really important thing. And it's going to be a huge advantage moving forward as we go to the moon and on to Mars. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, your point about COTS, commercial off-the-shelf technology. I mean, that's something that obviously governments have wanted to leverage for a long, long time for many, many decades. But Mark, the issue was always the, as Brian was just saying, the very stringent and difficult requirements of space. Obviously with Spaceborne One, you got to the point where you had visibility that the economics made sense. It made commercial sense for companies like Kulit Packard Enterprise. And now we've sort of closed that gap to the point where you're sort of now on that innovation curve. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Brian has some excellent points. You know, he said, anything we do today requires computers. And that's absolutely correct. So I tell people that when you go to the moon and when you go to the Mars, you probably want to go with the iPhone 10 or 11 and not a flip phone. So before Spaceborne was sent up, you went with 2000, early 2000s computing technology there, which like you said, many of the people born today weren't even around when the space station began and has been occupied. So they don't even know how to program or use that type of computing power. With Spaceborne One, we sent the exact same products that we were shipping to customers today. So they are current state-of-the-art and we had a mandate, don't touch the hardware, have all the protection that you can via software. So that's what we've done. We've got several philosophical ways to do that. We've implemented those in software. They've been successful, they've been proven in the Spaceborne One and now in Spaceborne Two, we're going to begin the experiments so that the rest of the community, so that the rest of the community can figure out that it is economically viable and it will accelerate their research and progress in space. So I'm most excited about that. Every venture in the space, as Brian mentioned, will require some computational capability and HPE has figured out that the economics are there and we need to bring the customers to Spaceborne Two in order for them to learn that we are all reliable, but current state-of-the-art and that we can benefit them and all of humanity. Guys, I want to ask you kind of a two-part question and Brian, I'll start with you and it's somewhat philosophical. I mean, my understanding was, and I want to say this was probably around the time of the Bush administration, W-2, and maybe certainly before that, but as technology progressed, there was a debate about, all right, should we put our resources on Moon because of the proximity to Earth or should we go where no man has gone before or a woman and get to Mars? What's the thinking today, Brian, on that balance between Moon and Mars? Well, our plans today are to get back to the Moon by 2024. That's the Artemis program. It's exciting. It makes sense from an engineering standpoint. You take baby steps as you continue to move forward and so you have that opportunity to learn while you're still relatively close to home. You can get there in days, not months. If you're going to Mars, for example, to have everything line up properly, you're looking at a multi-year mission. It may take you nine months to get there. Then you have to wait for the Earth and Mars to get back in the right position to come back on that same kind of trajectory. So you have to be there for more than a year before you can turn around and come back. So he was talking about the computing power. Right now, the beautiful thing about the space station is it's right there. It's orbiting above us. It's only 250 miles away. So you can test out all of these technologies. You can rely on the ground to keep track of systems. There's not that much of a delay in terms of the telemetry coming back as you get to the moon and then definitely as you get out to Mars. There are enough minutes delay out there that you've got to take the computing power with you. You've got to take everything you need to be able to make those decisions you need to make because there's not time to get that information back on the ground, get it back to Earth. Have people analyze the situation and then tell you what the next step is to do. That may be too late. So you've got to take the computing power with you. So Exascale maybe brings some new possibilities. Both for the moon and Mars, I know Spaceborne 1 did some simulations relative to Mars. We'll talk about that. But Brian, what are the things that you hope to get out of Exascale computing that maybe you couldn't do with previous generations? Well, you know, mark it on a key point. Bandwidth up and down is of course always a limitation and the more computing data analysis you can do on site, the more efficient you can be with parsing out that bandwidth and to give you a feel for just that kind of thing. Think about those observatories, Earth observing and Astronomical. I was talking about collecting data. Think about the hours of video that are being recorded daily as the astronauts work on various things to document what they're doing. Many of the biological experiments, one of the key pieces of data that's coming back is that video of the microbes growing or the plants growing or whatever fluid physics experiments going on. We do a lot of colloids research which is suspended particles inside a liquid and that of course high speed video is key to doing that kind of research. Right now we've got something called the ISS experience going on in there which is basically recording and will eventually put out a series of basically a movie on its virtual reality recording. That kind of data is so huge when you have a 360 degree camera up there recording all of that data through virtual reality. There's still a lot of times bringing that back on higher hard drives but when the SpaceX vehicles come back to Earth that's a lot of data going on. We record AK videos all the time. Tremendous amount of bandwidth going on and as you get to the moon and as you get further out you can imagine how much more limiting that bandwidth is. Yeah, we used to joke in the old mainframe days that the fastest way to get data from point A to point B was called CTAM, the Chevy Truck Access Method. You just load up a truck and whatever it was, tapes or hard drives. And Mark, of course, Spaceborne II was coming and Spaceborne I really was a pilot but it proved that commercial computers could actually work for long durations in space and the economics were feasible. Thinking about future missions in Spaceborne II what are you hoping to accomplish? I'm hoping to bring that success from Spaceborne I to the rest of the community with Spaceborne II so that they can realize they can do their processing at the edge. The purpose of exploration is insight, not data collection. So all of these experiments begin with data collection whether that's videos or samples or mold growing, et cetera, collecting that data we must process it to turn it into information and insight. And the faster we can do that the faster we get our results and the better things are. I often talk to a college in high school and sometimes grammar school students about this need to process at the edge and how the communication issues can prevent you from doing that. For example, many of us remember the communications with the moon. The moon is about 250,000 miles away if I remember correctly and the speed of light is 186,000 miles a second. So even at the speed of light it takes more than a second for the communications to get to the moon in back. So I can remember being stressed out when Houston would make a statement and we were wondering if the astronauts could answer. Well, they answered as soon as possible but that one to two second delay that was natural was what drove us crazy, which made us nervous. We were worried about them in the success of the mission. So Mars is millions of miles away. So flip it around. If you're a Mars explorer and you look out the window and there's a big red cloud coming at you that looks like a tornado and you might wanna do some Mars dust storm modeling right then and there to figure out what's the safest thing to do. You don't have the time literally to get that back to Earth, have them process it and get you to answer back. You've gotta take those computational capabilities with you and we're hoping that of these 15 to thousands of experiments that are on board the ISS can show that in order to better accomplish their missions on the moon and on Mars. I'm so glad you brought that up because I was gonna ask you guys in the commercial world, everybody talks about real time. Of course we talk about the real time edge and AI inferencing and the time value of data. I was gonna ask the real timeness, how do you handle that? And I think Mark, you just answered that. But at the same time, people will say in the commercial world like for instance, in advertising, the joke, it's not kind of a joke but the best minds of our generation are trying to get people to click on ads and it's somewhat true, unfortunately. But at any rate, the value of data diminishes over time. I would imagine in space exploration where you're dealing with things like light years that actually there's quite a bit of value in the historical data. But Mark, you just gave a great example of where you need real time compute capabilities on the ground. But Brian, I wonder if I could ask you, the value of this historical data, as you just described, collecting so much data, do you see that the value of that data actually persists over time? You can go back with better modeling and better AI and computing and actually learn from all that data. What are your thoughts on that, Brian? Definitely, I think the answer is yes to that. And as part of the evolution from basically a platform to a station, we're also learning to make use of the experiments and the data that we have there. NASA has set up an open data access sites for some of our physical science experiments that have taken place there and Gene Lab for looking at some of the biological genomic experiments that have gone on. I've seen papers already beginning to be generated not from the original experimenters and principal investigators, but from that data set that has been collected. And when you're sending something up to space and to the space station and volume or cargo is so limited, you want to get the most you can out of that. So you want to be as efficient as possible. And one of the ways you do that is you collect, you take these earth observing instruments and you take that data and sure the principal investigators are using it for the key thing that they designed it for. But if that data is available, others will come along and make use of it in different ways. Yeah, so I want to remind the audience that these are supercomputers, these spaceporn computers, they're solar powered, obviously, and they're mounted overhead, right? Is that correct? Yes, a spaceporn computer was mounted in the overhead. I jokingly say that as soon as someone can figure out how to get a data center in orbit, they will have a 50% denser data station that we can have down here. Instead of two robes side by side, you can also have one overhead. And the power is free if you can drive it off a solar and the cooling is free because it's pretty cold out there in space. So it's going to be very efficient. Spaceporn computer is the most energy efficient computer in existence, free electricity and free cooling. And now we're offering free cycles to all the experimenters on board. Yeah, so spaceporn one exceeded its mission timeframe. You were able to run, as I was mentioned before, some simulations for future Mars missions. And you talked a little bit about what you want to get out of spaceporn two. Are there other like wish list items, bucket list items that people are talking about? Yeah, two of them. And these are kind of hypothetical and Brian kind of alluded to them. One is having the data on board. So an example that a payload developers talk to us about is, hey, I'm on Mars and I see this mold growing on my potatoes. That's not good. So let me sample that mold, do a gene sequencing. And then I've got stored all the historical data on spaceporn computer of all the bad molds out there. And let me do a comparison right then and there before I have dinner with my fried potatoes. So that's one that's very interesting. A second one closer to related to it is, we have offered up the storage on spaceporn computer two for all of your raw data that we process. So Mr. Scientist, if you need the raw data and you need it now, of course you can have it sent down but if you don't, let us just hold it there as long as we have space. And when we return to earth, like you mentioned, Patrick we'll ship that solid state disk back to them so they can have a new person. But again, reserving that network bandwidth, keeping all that raw data available for the entire duration of the mission so that it may have value later on. Great, thank you for that. I wanna end on just sort of talking about if you come back to the collaboration between ISS, National Labs and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and you've got your inviting project ideas using spaceporn two during the upcoming mission. Maybe you could talk about what that's about and we have a graphic we're gonna put up and some information that you can access but please Mark share with us what you're planning there. So again, the collaboration has been outstanding. There's been a mention of how much savings is if you can reduce a weight by a pound. Well, our partners, the ISS, National Lab and NASA have taken on that cost of delivering spaceporn computer to the International Space Station as part of their collaboration and powering and cooling us and giving us the technical support. In return on our side, we're offering up spaceporn computer too for all the onboard experiments and all those that think they might be wanting to do an experiment on spaceporn on the ISS in the future to make advantage of that. So we're very, very excited about that. Yeah, and you can go to just email spaceporn at hpe.com and just float some ideas. I'm sure at some point there'll be a website so you can email them or you can email me david.volante at siliconangle.com and I'll shoot you that email or that website once we get it. But Brian, I want to end with you. You've been so gracious with your time. Give us your final thoughts on Exascale. Maybe how you're celebrating Exascale Day. I was joking with Mark. Maybe we get a special Exascale drink for 10-18, but what are your final thoughts, Brian? Well, I'm going to digress just a little bit. I think I have a unique perspective to celebrate Exascale Day because as an undergraduate student, I was interning at Langley Research Center in the wind tunnels. And the wind tunnel I was in, they were very excited that they had a new state-of-the-art giant room-sized computer to take that data. We worked on unsteady aerodynamic forces so you need a lot of computation and you need to be able to take data at a high bandwidth to be able to do that. They'd always run their wind tunnel for four or five hours, almost a whole shift, collect that data, and maybe a week later, been able to look at the data to decide if they got what they were looking for. Well, at the time in the early 80s, this is definitely the before times, that I got there, they had that computer in place. Yes, it was a punch card computer. It was the one time in my life. I got to put my hands on the punch cards and was told not to drop them. I wouldn't get in trouble if I did that. But I was able to immediately after, actually during their run, take that data, reduce it down, grab my colored pencils and some graph paper and graph out them, coefficient of lift, coefficient of drag, other things that they were measuring, take it back to them, and they were so excited to have data two hours after they had taken it, analyzed and looked at it, because it tickled them pink that they can make decisions now on what they wanted to do for their next run. Well, we've come a long way since then. Exascale Day really, really emphasizes that point. So it really brings it home to me. Go ahead. No, please, carry on. Well, I was just gonna say, you've talked about the opportunities that Spaceborne Computer provides and Mark mentioned our colleagues at the ISS National Lab. The space station has been declared a national laboratory and so about half of the capabilities we have for doing research is a portion to the National Lab so that commercial entities, so that the HPE can do these sorts of projects and universities can access the station and other government agencies and then NASA can focus in on those things we wanna do purely to push our exploration programs. So the opportunities to take advantage of that are there. Mark's opening up the door for a lot of opportunities, but others can just Google ISS National Laboratory and find some information on how to get in the way Mark did originally using ISS National Lab to maybe get a good experiment up there. Well, it's just astounding to see the progress that this industry has made when you go back and look at the early days of supercomputing to imagine that they actually can be Spaceborne is just tremendous and not only the impacts that it can have on space exploration, but also society in general, Mark, we talked about that. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and celebrating Exascale Day and helping expand the community. Great work and thank you very much for all that you guys do. Thank you very much for having me on and everybody out there. Let's get to Exascale as quick as we can. Appreciate everything y'all are doing. Let's do it. Hey, Brian, I've got a similar story. Humanity saw the first trillion calculations per second, like I said, in 1997 and it was over a hundred racks of computer equipment. Well, Spaceborne one is less than fourth of a rack in only 20 years. So I'm gonna be celebrating Exascale Day in anticipation of Exascale computers on earth and soon following within the National Lab that exists in 20 plus years and being on Mars. That's awesome, Mark, thank you for that. And thank you for watching everybody. We're celebrating Exascale Day with the community, the supercomputing community on theCUBE, right back.