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How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

cacm.acm.org

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Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#11

Post by pclmulqdq »

totetsu wrote: post #10
object-a wrote: post #9

How big of a challenge are hardware faults and radiation for orbital data centers? It seems like you’d eat a lot of capacity if you need 4x redundancy for everything

They dont go into here.. but I thought that NASA also used like 250nm chips in space for radiation resistance. Are there even any radiation resistance GPUs out there?

Absolutely not, although the latest fabs with rad-tolerant processors are at ~20 nm. There are FDSOI processes in that generation that I assume can be made radiation-tolerant.

Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#13

Post by linzhangrun »

totetsu wrote: post #10
object-a wrote: post #9

How big of a challenge are hardware faults and radiation for orbital data centers? It seems like you’d eat a lot of capacity if you need 4x redundancy for everything

They dont go into here.. but I thought that NASA also used like 250nm chips in space for radiation resistance. Are there even any radiation resistance GPUs out there?

[flagged]

Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#14

Post by bluegatty »

ramraj07 wrote: post #6
dmk wrote: post #3

The quote from the CMU guy about modern Agile and DevOps approaches challenging architectural discipline is a nice way of saying most of us have completely forgotten how to build deterministic systems. Time-triggered Ethernet with strict frame scheduling feels like it's from a parallel universe compared to how we ship software now.

I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer. This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world. Le…

No, space is just hard.

Everything is bespoke.

You need 10x cost to get every extra '9' in reliability and manned flight needs a lot of nines.

People died on the Apollo missions.

It just costs that much.

Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#15

Post by HNisCIS »

ramraj07 wrote: post #6
dmk wrote: post #3

The quote from the CMU guy about modern Agile and DevOps approaches challenging architectural discipline is a nice way of saying most of us have completely forgotten how to build deterministic systems. Time-triggered Ethernet with strict frame scheduling feels like it's from a parallel universe compared to how we ship software now.

I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer. This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world. Le…

What would you suggest? Vibe coding a react app that runs on a Mac mini to control trajectory? What happens when that Mac mini gets hit with an SEU or even a SEGR? Guess everyone just dies?

Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#18

Post by arduanika »

bluegatty wrote: post #14
ramraj07 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer. This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world. Le…

No, space is just hard. Everything is bespoke. You need 10x cost to get every extra '9' in reliability and manned flight needs a lot of nines. People died on the Apollo missions. It just costs that much.

Please, this is hacker news. Nothing else is hard outside of our generic software jobs, and we could totally solve any other industry in an afternoon.

Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#19

Post by geerlingguy »

arduanika wrote: post #18
bluegatty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, space is just hard. Everything is bespoke. You need 10x cost to get every extra '9' in reliability and manned flight needs a lot of nines. People died on the Apollo missions. It just costs that much.

Please, this is hacker news. Nothing else is hard outside of our generic software jobs, and we could totally solve any other industry in an afternoon.

I mean I can just replace Dropbox with a shell script.

Re: How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer

#20

Post by arduanika »

dmk wrote: post #3

The quote from the CMU guy about modern Agile and DevOps approaches challenging architectural discipline is a nice way of saying most of us have completely forgotten how to build deterministic systems. Time-triggered Ethernet with strict frame scheduling feels like it's from a parallel universe compared to how we ship software now.

You could even say that part of the value of Artemis is that we're remembering how to do some very hard things, including the software side. This is something that you can't fake. In a world where one of the more plausible threats of AI is the atrophy of real human skills -- the goose that lays the golden eggs that trains the models -- this is a software feat where I'd claim you couldn't rely on vibe code, at least not fully.

That alone is worth my tax dollars.

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