China has launched the primary 12 satellites of a deliberate 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer satellite tv for pc community, reviews Area Information. The satellites, created by the corporate ADA Area, Zhijiang Laboratory, and Neijang Excessive-Tech Zone, will be capable of course of the info they accumulate themselves, reasonably than counting on terrestrial stations to do it for them, in response to ADA Area’s announcement (machine-translated).
The satellites are a part of ADA Area’s “Star Compute” program and the primary of what it calls the “Three-Physique Computing Constellation,” the corporate writes. Every of the 12 satellites has an onboard 8-billion parameter AI mannequin and is able to 744 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a measure of their AI processing grunt — and, collectively, ADA Area says they will handle 5 peta operations per second, or POPS. That’s fairly a bit greater than, say, the 40 TOPS required for a Microsoft Copilot PC. The eventual purpose is to have a community of hundreds of satellites that obtain 1,000 POPs, in response to the Chinese language authorities.
The satellites talk with one another at up-to-100Gbps utilizing lasers, and share 30 terabytes of storage between them, in response to Area Information. The 12 launched final week carry scientific payloads, together with an X-ray polarization detector for selecting up temporary cosmic phenomena corresponding to gamma-ray bursts. The satellites even have the potential to create 3D digital twin information that can be utilized for functions like emergency response, gaming, and tourism, ADA Area says in its announcement.
The advantages of getting a space-based supercomputer transcend saving communications time, in response to South China Morning Submit. The outlet notes that conventional satellite tv for pc transmissions are gradual, and that “lower than 10 per cent” of satellite tv for pc information makes it to Earth, attributable to issues like restricted bandwidth and floor station availability. And Jonathan McDowell, an area historian and astronomer at Harvard College, advised the outlet, “Orbital information centres can use solar energy and radiate their warmth to area, decreasing the vitality wants and carbon footprint.” He stated each the US and Europe may perform comparable initiatives sooner or later, writes SCMP.
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