Ev5: Fill & Download for Free

The fastest supercomputer from the 1990s I have in my collection is a DEC AlphaServer 8200, which was originally part of a three-node cluster (with a memory channel interconnect) installed at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. In June 1996 it occupied the 437th place on the Supercomputer Top 500 list, so I believe it qualifies. I’m comparing it (the three-node cluster) against my Dell M4800 laptop. I’ll focus on those aspects that are relevant to what a supercomputer would have been used for; floating point performance, memory, and power consumption.CPU’sThe cluster had 12 300 MHz EV5 Alpha CPU’s, good for 3.75 GFLOPs on a LINPACK benchmark. My laptop has a single 4-core 2.8GHz i7–4900MQ CPU, good for 145 GFLOPS on the same benchmark (using AVX2 instructions). So, my laptop is close to 40 times faster for floating-point operations.MemoryThe cluster had 6 GB of main memory (2GB per node), my laptop has 32 GB. In each AlphaServer, memory is accessed through a 2.1GB/sec bus, so if each CPU only uses memory that is local to it, the aggregate memory bandwidth of the cluster is 6.3 GB/sec. The memory bandwidth of my laptop is 25.6 GB/sec. So, my laptop has 5 times as much memory, which it can access at least 4 times as fast.Power ConsumptionThe AlphaServer 8200 uses around 2KW of power, so the cluster would have used around 6KW. My laptop tops out at 180W.

About 10 years, if funding is allocated by US Congress during 2017 and later years.NASA is currently planning the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which would use a robotic spacecraft to - among other things* - return 20–50 tons of asteroid material to lunar orbit for human astronauts to work with. Under the current plan; ARM would launch the robotic spacecraft at the end of 2021, arrive at the asteroid 2008 EV5 in 2023, and return to Earth-Moon space in 2025. Astronauts would work with the returned asteroid material in 2026.ARM would provide the opportunity to flight-demonstrate space resource utilization on a fairly large scale. For example, the astronauts could put a few hundred kilograms of asteroid material into a prototype water-extraction system provided by one of the current space-resource start-up companies and get 30 kg of water out of it (2008 EV5 is perhaps 10% water by mass on its surface).ARM by itself wouldn’t quite be enough to make asteroid mining profitable. e.g. It would involve launching more than 5 tons of robotic spacecraft and getting back at most 5 tons of water. At that point, it still makes more sense economically to ship water up from Earth. But demonstrations of space resource utilization are a necessary precursor to larger-scale asteroid mining that would be cost-effective in terms of providing products such as water, radiation shielding, and steel in space.NASA plans to begin construction of the spacecraft for ARM during 2017, if funding is allocated by the US Congress during the next few months. If you want to lobby the space and science committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives in support of ARM, you are welcome to do so: U.S. Senate Committee On Commerce, Science, & Transportation , U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology .*Other things ARM would do:Demonstrate gravity tractor asteroid deflection, useful in the roughly 10% chance survey programs find an asteroid with a future Earth impact that is large enough to require deflection.Demonstrate high-power solar electric propulsion, useful for efficiently moving large masses of material around the inner solar system (such as cargo in advance of a human Mars mission).Study the internal structure and mechanical properties of 2008 EV5, providing information on asteroid geophysics that we don’t currently have. This is relevant both to understanding the near-Earth population and to predicting the outcome of other asteroid deflection methods such as kinetic impactor deflection.ARM is not the mission one would do to accomplish any one of these goals in isolation, but it is a cost-effective way to accomplish all of them at the same time.

There are currently plans to demonstrate two separate methods of asteroid deflection on two separate asteroids.NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission would demonstrate gravity tractor asteroid deflection, moving the asteroid 2008 EV5 by hundreds of meters over a period of months. This is one of several goals of the ARM project; which would also demonstrate high-power solar electric propulsion, allow demonstrations of in-situ resource utilization technologies, test equipment for future human missions outside of Earth-Moon space, and do scientific investigations of EV5’s surface and interior.The ESA+NASA AIDA project would demonstrate kinetic impactor asteroid deflection, moving the smaller component of the binary asteroid Didymos by impacting one spacecraft (DART) into it at extremely high velocity while a second spacecraft (AIM) observed the collision and measured the resulting perturbation to the mutual orbit of the two components of the binary. AIDA will also provide detailed information on the composition and structure of Didymos Beta’s surface and interior.