IGNITING A NEW ORBIT FOR SPACE RESEARCH

From mission design to Earth observation, HPC is now the hidden engine accelerating simulations, autonomy, and discovery across global space science.

- BY PRATIMA HARIGUNANI

There is Hopper. There is an Octopus. There is IceCore. There is Marvin. There is Satyameba. There is Param Rudra. These are not star students strolling across a university campus, but star machines powering those students, their professors, and entire ecosystems of research. The world of exascale simulations, GPU clusters, and high-performance computing is blossoming in new colours and scales across universities, laboratories, and space-tech projects everywhere.

Recently, the European Space Agency unveiled the ESA Space High-Performance Computing (HPC) environment, now available to support scientific research and technological development across all ESA programmes. The ESA Space HPC supercomputer, inaugurated at ESRIN in Italy in March, has been designed to meet the rising computational demands of the European space industry—particularly for weather modelling, rapid warnings, and advanced simulations.

Earlier this year, the National University of Singapore expanded its computing might with Hopper, a supercomputer capable of 25 quadrillion calculations per second, or 25 PetaFLOPS, dramatically empowering NUS researchers with unprecedented HPC access.

In the United States, the University of Alabama is developing an HPC project aimed at mitigating the rising financial and energy costs associated with AI and machine-learning research. The Executive Director of the University’s High Performance Computing and Data Centre described the push simply: “Having access to the GPUs at the HPC will enable our faculty and students to do scientific-level research and AI.”

Across the Pacific, the Osaka University D3 Centre is progressing swiftly with trial operations of the “Osaka University Compute and sTOrage Platform Urging open Science” (Octopus), built by NEC Corporation. With a theoretical performance of 2.293 PetaFLOPS and 140 computing nodes, Octopus is a computational and data platform designed to drive open science.