China has launched the first 12 of a planned constellation of 1,800 satellites that will act as an orbiting supercomputer.
The satellites were designed and built by Chinese company ADA Space, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang High-Tech Zone, and are part of ADA Space’s ‘Star Compute’ programme.
This will allow the linked satellites to be able to process data in space, rather than having to transmit it down to Earth first.
This can save in communications time but also has a number of other potential benefits compared to terrestrial stations and data processing centres.
In general, less than 10% of data collected by satellites actually makes it to terrestrial processing centres, due to issues including bandwidth and limited ground station availability.
Processing data as it is collected is far more efficient and avoids both delays and wastage.
Earthbound data processing also require large amounts of energy, with much of the demand going to extensive cooling systems.
According to Jonathan McDowell, a space historian and astronomer at Harvard University, space-based data processing facilities can make use of easily harvested solar power and disperse the heat they generate into space.
Satellite constellation could rival the most powerful terrestrial supercomputers
The 12 satellites launched so far represent only a fraction of the planned 1,800-unit constellation, which could eventually rival the most sophisticated terrestrial supercomputers.
According to details released by ADA Space, each of the current satellites has an onboard AI model with 8 billion parameters.
Each is capable of 744 TOPS or tera operations per second, a metric used to measure the theoretical peak performance of AI hardware.
For context, a Microsoft Copilot PC requires around 40 TOPS. The satellites can also link, however, and can collectively manage 5 peta operations per second, or POPS.
Once completed, the constellation is expected to deliver real-time, in-orbit processing at a staggering 1,000 POPS, equivalent to one quintillion operations per second.
The satellites can communicate with each other at up to 100Gbps using lasers, and the current crop of 12 share 30 terabytes of storage between them.
McDowell said that the concept of cloud computing in space was “very fashionable right now” and that the launch represented “the first substantial flight test of the networking part of this concept”.
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