A History Of NASA Supercomputers, Among Others

May 5, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 8 Comments

The History Guy on YouTube has posted an interesting video on the history of the supercomputer, with a specific focus on their use by NASA for the implementation of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of aeronautical assemblies.

The aero designers of the day were quickly finding out the limitations of the wind tunnel testing approach, especially for so-called transonic flow conditions. This occurs when an object moving through a fluid (like air can be modeled) produces regions of supersonic flow mixed in with subsonic flow and makes for additional drag scenarios. This severely impacts aircraft performance. Not accounting for these effects is not an option, hence the great industry interest in CFD modeling. But the equations for which (usually based around the Navier-Stokes system) are non-linear, and extremely computationally intensive.

Obviously, a certain Mr. Cray is a prominent player in this story, who, as the story goes, exhausted the financial tolerance of his employer, CDC, and subsequently formed Cray Research Inc, and the rest is (an interesting) history. Many Cray machines were instrumental in the development of the space program, and now adorn computing museums the world over. You simply haven’t lived until you’ve sipped your weak lemon drink whilst sitting on the ‘bench’ around an early Cray machine.

You see, supercomputers are a different beast from those machines mere mortals have access to, or at least the earlier ones were. The focus is on pure performance, ideally for floating-point computation, with cost far less of a concern, than getting to the next computational milestone. The Cray-1 for example, is a 64-bit machine capable of 80 MIPS scalar performance (whilst eating over 100 kW of juice), and some very limited parallel processing ability.

While this was immensely faster than anything else available at the time, the modern approach to supercomputing is less about fancy processor design and more about the massive use of parallelism of existing chips with lots of local fast storage mixed in. Every hacker out there should experience these old machines if they can, because the tricks they used and the lengths the designers went to get squeeze out every ounce of processing grunt, can be a real eye-opener.

Want to see what happens when you really push out the boat and use the whole wafer for parallel computation? Checkout the Cerberus. If your needs are somewhat less, but dabbling in parallel computing gets you all pumped, you could build a small array out of Pine64s. Finally, the story wouldn’t be complete without talking about the life and sad early demise of Seymour Cray.
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Virgin Galactic Cautiously Returns To Flight

May 4, 2023 by Tom Nardi 32 Comments

After Richard Branson delivered some inspiring words from his seat aboard SpaceShipTwo Unity, he unbuckled himself and started to float around the vehicle’s cabin along with three other Virgin Galactic employees. Reaching an apogee of 86 kilometers (53 miles), the passengers enjoyed four minutes of weightlessness during the July 2021 flight that was live-streamed over the Internet to an audience of millions. After years of delays, SpaceShipTwo had finally demonstrated it was capable of taking paying customers to the edge of space. As far as victories go — it was pretty impressive.

Yet despite the spectacle, weeks and months went by without an announcement about when commercial flights of the world’s first “spaceline” would finally begin. Now, nearly two years after Branson’s flight, Unity has flown again. Except instead of carrying the first group of customers, it performed the sort of un-powered test flight that Virgin Galactic hasn’t performed since 2017. Clearly, something didn’t go to plan back then.

The company is being as tight-lipped as ever, saying only that this test flight was necessary to “evaluate the performance of the spaceship…following the modification period.” The exact nature of these modifications is unclear, but for some hints, we could look at the New Yorker article from September 2021. It alleged that, unwilling to derail Branson’s highly publicized flight, Unity’s pilots decided not to abort their ascent despite several warning lights in the cockpit alerting them that the vehicle’s trajectory was deviating from the norm. Virgin Galactic later denied their characterization of the event, but the fact remains that Unity did leave its designated airspace during the flight, and that the Federal Aviation Administration grounded the spacecraft until an investigation into the mishap could be completed. Continue reading “Virgin Galactic Cautiously Returns To Flight” →

Barcodes Enter The Matrix In 2027

May 3, 2023 by Kristina Panos 80 Comments

Beep. We’ve come a long way since June 26, 1974 when the first bar code was scanned at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio. That legendary pack of Juicy Fruit proved that even the smallest of items could now carry numbers associated with inventory and price.

By now, we’re all too familiar with this sound as self-checkouts have become the norm. Whereas you yourself could at one time literally check out during the transaction, you must now be on your toes and play find the bar code on every item.

What does the consumer gain from the bar code today? Practically nothing, except the chance to purchase, and potentially return, the item without too much hassle. Well, the non-profit outfit that runs the bar code world — GS1 US — wants to change all that. By 2027, they are confident that all 1D bar codes will be replaced with 2D bar codes similar to QR codes. Why?

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Getting Ready For Act 2 Of The Great American Eclipse

May 2, 2023 by Dan Maloney 41 Comments

It seems like only yesterday that the “Great American Eclipse” swept from coast to coast, and for those who were lucky enough to watch it from along the path of totality, it was a true life experience. No natural phenomenon can compete with the beauty of a total solar eclipse, and if there’s one thing I heard more than anything else in those golden moments after the Sun returned from behind the Moon, it was, “When’s the next one?” Everyone wanted to do it again, and for good reason.

Back in 2017, that question was kind of rhetorical; everyone knew the next eclipse to cross the United States was a mere seven years off. For me personally, the passage of time has not dampened my enthusiasm for eclipses one bit, and I suspect the feeling is mutual among the many people who gazed in wonder and childlike glee at the celestial proceedings of 2017. But except for the very lucky who live within the path of totality, mounting an expedition that optimizes the viewing experience takes preparation. Now that we’re a little less than a year away for the next one, it’s time to get geared up and make plans for the 2024 eclipse.

Where and When?

The 2017 eclipse’s “Great American Eclipse” moniker was well earned, as the continental United States was the sole beneficiary of the view. This time around, the US isn’t the only country along the path; Mexico and Canada will also get in on the fun. In fact, Mexico may well be the best place to watch the eclipse from, but more on that later. Continue reading “Getting Ready For Act 2 Of The Great American Eclipse” →

Your Guide To Using Amazon’s Sidewalk Network For The Internet Of Things

May 1, 2023 by Lewin Day 61 Comments

As the Internet of Things became a mainstream reality, it raised an interesting point about connectivity. We quickly learned it wasn’t ideal to have every light bulb, toaster, and kettle buzzing away on our main WiFi networks. Nor was it practical to sign up for a cellular data plan for every tracker tag or remote sensor we wanted to use.

To solve this issue, various tech companies have developed their own low-power mesh networking solutions. Amazon’s Sidewalk network is one of the widest spread in the US. Now, it’s opening it up for wider use beyond its own products, and you can get in on the action.

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Add A Little Quindar To Your Comms For That Apollo-Era Sound

April 30, 2023 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

If there’s one thing that ties together all the media coming out of the Apollo era, it’s probably the iconic Quindar tones. These quarter-second beeps served as control tones for the globe-spanning communications network needed to talk to the Apollo astronauts, and any attempt to recreate the Apollo-era sound would be glaringly wrong without them. And that’s why [CuriousMarc] whipped up this Quindar tone system.

The video below starts with a detailed treatment of what Quindar tones are and why they were used, a topic we’ve covered ourselves in the past. To recap, Quindar tones are a form of in-band signaling, with a 2,525-Hz pure sine wave intro tone that signaled the transmitters connected to Mission Control in Houston over leased telephone lines to key up. The 2,475-Hz outro tone turned off the transmitters and connected the line to the receivers.

To recreate the sound quality of the original circuitry, and to keep in the retro vibe, [Marc]’s Quindar homage avoided digital circuitry as much as possible, opting instead to generate the two tones with an XR-2206 function generator chip. The chip can rapidly switch back and forth between two frequencies, making it perfect for FSK applications or, in this case, reproducing the two slightly different tones. [Marc] added a dual mono-stable multi-vibrator to pulse the tone, giving the 250-ms pulse, and an audio gate, which uses a MOSFET to switch the tone into an audio stream. All this got soldered up to a piece of perf board and stuffed in the base of a cheap intercom microphone, which while not period accurate still has a cool retro look — and now, a retro sound, too.

Hats off to [CuriousMarc] and his merry band for probing the mysteries of Apollo-era comms and keeping the accomplishments of all those engineers alive. The methods they used are still relevant after all these years, and there seems to be no end to what we can learn from them.

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Rising To The Occasion: A Brief History Of Crewed High Altitude Balloons

April 28, 2023 by Al Williams 11 Comments

Piccard inspects an instrument on his balloon (Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-10382 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

We think of human flight as a relatively modern affair, with a few claims to the first airplane all around the turn of the last century. But people flew much earlier than that by using hot air balloons as well as gas-filled ones. While the Montgolfier brothers get most of the credit for hot air ballooning in 1783, there are some reports that a Brazilian priest may have lifted himself with a balloon as early as 1709.

Regardless, we’ve had balloons a good century earlier than winged flight, if not longer. While the device is deceptively simple, it is possible to get a balloon to very high altitudes without a lot of specialized technology. Airplanes at high altitudes need a way to get enough oxygen to fuel their engines, or they have to rely on rockets. Either way, there are plenty of design and operational challenges.

Balloons, of course, can simply rise to the occasion. Auguste Piccard and an assistant took a gas-filled balloon to 15,781 meters in 1931. Their gondola was pressurized, and they were the first humans to see the curvature of the Earth and the dark sky above. That record wouldn’t stand for long, though.

CCCP-1

The Soviet Union was keenly interested in Piccard’s flight, and the Soviet Air Force set about to build a research vessel, CCCP-1 (in English, USSR-1), that flew in 1933. The envelope was a large amount of thin fabric impregnated with latex and filled with hydrogen. The air-tight gondola presented several challenges in design. Most of the science experiments were outside, of course, and in 1933, you didn’t have an Arduino and RC servos to control things.

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