The ISS Has a Supercomputer! Never Mind the Fried Disks

One year ago, Hewlett Packard Enterprise sent an off-the-shelf supercomputer up to the International Space Station, to see if its mass-produced hardware could survive, basically unmodified, in the harsh environment of space. Now NASA and the computer company are declaring the experiment a success--even though nearly half of its hard disks failed after getting fried by solar radiation. The experiment was designed to test the performance of the HPE Spaceborne Computer, which is comprised of 32 separate cores that work together and can run operations 30 to 100 times faster than a standard iPhone or tablet. Despite the radiation blast, the computer kept working and none of the test data was lost. "They learned a few things and they demonstrated that the system works in space," says NASA's David Hornyak, who manages technology demonstration projects on ISS.