Radiation Resistant Computers
We've all heard of the computing power that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon -- but do you know that today's CPUs that make it out to space are about 10 times slower on average to equivalent CPUs available to the consumer market? Not only that, but they're more expensive and more power hungry. This might drive you to ask why the various space agencies -- NASA especially -- wastes so much money. There is a good reason for this "waste." Just as radiation from space can be damaging to humans -- from our cells to DNA -- they can also mess with CPUs, causing them to produce errors.
NASA has solved this problem by employing radiation hardened CPUs -- at the cost of price, energy and speed of course. On a trip to Mars however, NASA would like to employ more powerful CPUs and do it cheaply. One biggest benefit of sending more horsepower on a Martian mission would be the allowance for on-site data analysis. This would allow astronauts to make decisions about what to study in further detail, as well, crunching data would allow just the results to be relayed to Earth, instead of huge amounts of raw data. Hence an interest in off the shelf CPUs. But how to protect from radiation? The easy way would be redundancy -- multiple CPUs doing to same task, then picking the most consistent result to use. A smarter version of this would be to determine first which computation is important enough to use that process. Results that would live some error would just use one CPU and take their chance with luck. Important calculations would get the benefit of redundancy, ensuring the right results are obtained.
Read more: Radiation Resistant Computers.
NASA has solved this problem by employing radiation hardened CPUs -- at the cost of price, energy and speed of course. On a trip to Mars however, NASA would like to employ more powerful CPUs and do it cheaply. One biggest benefit of sending more horsepower on a Martian mission would be the allowance for on-site data analysis. This would allow astronauts to make decisions about what to study in further detail, as well, crunching data would allow just the results to be relayed to Earth, instead of huge amounts of raw data. Hence an interest in off the shelf CPUs. But how to protect from radiation? The easy way would be redundancy -- multiple CPUs doing to same task, then picking the most consistent result to use. A smarter version of this would be to determine first which computation is important enough to use that process. Results that would live some error would just use one CPU and take their chance with luck. Important calculations would get the benefit of redundancy, ensuring the right results are obtained.
Read more: Radiation Resistant Computers.
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