Italy’s Defense Ministry is considering a “military space cloud” and has commissioned state-backed aerospace contractor Leonardo to test the concept.
The Military Space Cloud Architecture project “aims to define a space-based architecture that can provide high-performance computing and storage capacity to governments and national militaries directly in space,” Leonardo explained on Monday.
The plan calls for a constellation of satellites capable of 250 teraFLOPS of single-precision performance and capable of storing at least 100 TB in orbit.
To put this in perspective, the current flagship GPU, Nvidia’s H100 SXM, is capable of 989 TeraFLOPS of sparse single-precision performance when using the TensorFloat-32 data type. Storage requirements, on the other hand, can be achieved using a small number of high-capacity NVMe drives, like the 61.44TB Solidigm drive that our sister site Blocks and Files introduced last year.
These resources will be networked together to support artificial intelligence workloads and data analysis, essentially becoming a supercomputing cluster in orbit. Leonardo claims the constellation will process data faster, increase availability for people on the ground, and make communications less disrupted than ground systems.
“Cyber-secured supercomputers and space archive systems ensure that users can access strategic data such as communications, earth observation and navigation data anytime, anywhere, even in the most remote areas. ” Leonardo explained. “Storing data in orbit also provides a useful backup for Earth centers, which are most exposed to natural disasters.”
Or that’s the idea anyway. Leonardo, together with his joint ventures Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space, will study the concept over the next two years to determine whether a space-based supercomputer can actually reach orbit.
The research will be conducted in two stages. The first seeks to define the underlying architecture of the satellites, and the second simulates the deployment of these satellites using Leonardo’s digital twin running on his Davinci-1 supercomputer. I’ll try. This simulation helps identify potential problems with orbital trajectories and estimates communication coverage areas.
As previously explained, space is not the most hostile environment for electronics, and special considerations such as radiation tolerance and high levels of redundancy are needed to deal with cosmic rays that can damage hardware and destroy data. Is required. Power, thermal management, and weight issues must also be considered.
Although reusable rockets like those developed by SpaceX have lowered the cost per kilogram, the cost of putting objects into orbit is still far from cheap. But if all goes well and the experimental phase is approved, a small constellation of satellites will be launched for real-world testing.
Simone Ungaro, CIO of Leonardo, said in a statement: “We are the first in Europe to develop a Space Cloud project, demonstrating the feasibility and benefits of using this architecture and establishing a new paradigm for cloud and edge computing. “It makes it possible,” he said. .
This is not the first time Leonardo has been tasked with evaluating space-based computing. Back in 2022, Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Leonardo and French conglomerate Thales, was asked to carry out a feasibility study to launch a data center into orbit as part of the Horizon Europe research program . However, in that case, the motive objective was the environment.
Most recently, Axiom Space revealed that it plans to build and launch an in-orbit data center to support commercial space station missions. The goal in that case was to reduce dependence on ground services. ®