Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Center Handles Massive Image Processing Needs with 100 Processor BladeRack System from RackSaver
RackSaver, a leading provider of high-density individual rack-mounted servers and supercomputing clusters, today announced that one of its BladeRack systems has been acquired by the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which was responsible for last month's discovery of snow and water on Mars.
Researchers at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleagues at CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), announced last month that melting snow is the likely cause of the numerous eroded gullies first documented on Mars in 2000 by NASA's Global Surveyor satellite.
The Mars Space Flight Facility's new BladeRack is a 50-node, dual AMD 2000+ processor-powered system, running Red Hat Linux Version 7.3. This powerful BladeRack system will enable the researchers to translate the continuous flow of raw data that is being gathered from instruments on NASA satellites orbiting Mars into clean images that are suitable for study. They are also using the BladeRack system to test new processing methods on thousands of archived image files. This is done to help confirm mineralogy and petrology of localized deposits associated with hydrothermal or sub-aqueous environments (e.g., dry lake beds). This information will be used to plan the next stages of the exploration of Mars.
"Satisfying the high-performance computing needs of true leaders in scientific discovery like the individuals at ASU's Mars Space Flight Facility is one of the goals we set for RackSaver as a company at its inception," said David Driggers, RackSaver CEO. "We take great pride in the fact that our BladeRack system will be able to assist these talented scientists in their work to discover new information that will be the foundation for the exploration of Mars."
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