SUPERCOMPUTING AND SPACE EXPLORATION

You’ll probably have noticed that NASA is intent on returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. Called the Artemis programme, it’ll be based on the Orion spacecraft that will be launched atop the new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. But given NASA’s apparent reluctance to use Linux for mission-critical applications, it’ll probably come as no surprise that Linux doesn’t form a part of either Orion or SLS. That doesn’t mean that the success of Artemis won’t depend on Linux, though – far from it.

Underpinning the design and verification of all NASA’s spacecraft is simulation, and Artemis is no exception. It’s surely not surprising that these simulations are hugely processorintensive, so some serious computing muscle was called for. Simulations of the landing process, for example, are being carried out at NASA’s AMES Research Center in California on a supercomputer called Aitken. In November 2021, when it boasted 242,688 cores, it was the world’s 49th fastest computer, but it’s been expanded since then. And, needless to say, since the operating system has powered all the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers since 2017, it runs Linux.

If you want to learn more about why Linux is the undisputed king of supercomputing, be sure to take a look at our expose in LXF284. If you’ll excuse this spoiler, though, with commercial top-end operating systems being licenced per core, if you’ve got a quarter of a million cores, FOSS is surely the way to go, and such financial considerations are just the tip of the iceberg.