Tag: engineers

Engineers enlist NASA to send yet another time capsule to the moon — 24 sapphire discs will contain ‘the very essence of humanity’ printed over 170 billion pixels but who will read them?

Post author By lisa nichols
Post date April 1, 2024
No Comments on Engineers enlist NASA to send yet another time capsule to the moon — 24 sapphire discs will contain ‘the very essence of humanity’ printed over 170 billion pixels but who will read them?

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NASA, in collaboration with a team of international scientists, researchers, designers, and artists led by French engineer Benoit Faiveley, is set to send another time capsule to the moon.

The project, titled “Sanctuary on the Moon”, is part of NASA’s ambitious Artemis CLPS program and enjoys the support of UNESCO and the patronage of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Sanctuary on the Moon aims to engrave 24 sapphire discs with “the very essence of humanity”. The discs, currently being engraved at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), will contain a diverse portrait of our species in micropixels – up to 7 billion per disc.

An inspiration for generations to come

This will be the first time the collective human ‘recipe’ in the form of male and female genomes will be taken to another world, and the project aims to pass on an intelligible message to future generations of humans – and other intelligent life forms who might happen to stop – by using universal symbols of our knowledge and culture. The plan is to tell the story of “who we are, what we know, and what we do” and the discs will include examples of mathematics, culture, paleontology, art, and science, along with the human genome.

The moon, with its ancient surface impervious to natural disasters, is viewed as being the ideal location for this archival time capsule which will be housed in a container designed to endure the harsh lunar conditions for many years, meeting all the space certifications required by NASA.

Joel Kearns, NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, expressed his excitement about the project. “We are delighted to take Sanctuary to the Moon”, he said. “We believe that this internationally curated repository of knowledge on the Moon will serve as an inspiration today and for many generations to come.”

The multidisciplinary Sanctuary team includes 11 renowned scientists, engineers, astrophysicists, paleontologists, cosmologists, and artists. The project has also received support from organizations such as CNES, CEA, INRIA, BCGSC, and UNESCO.

You can find out more about the Sanctuary on the Moon project here.

The Sanctuary team looking at the 'Life' disc on WILDER images wall, at INRIA Paris Saclay

(Image credit: Benedict Redgrove)

Want to break the geekiest world record of them all? Here’s how engineers spent 75 days to calculate Pi to 105 trillion digits — just in time for Pi day

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Engineers at StorageReview decided to do something incredibly geeky for this year’s Pi day (March 14 – 3/14) – beat their own record for calculating Pi. Considering that the previous record, achieved last year, was 100 trillion digits, the challenge was no mean feat. While – spoiler alert – they smashed the record, it did take them 75 days to accomplish it.

The task was achieved using a dual processor 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo system, equipped with 1.5TB of DRAM and nearly a petabyte of Solidigm QLC SSDs.

The team started their computation on December 14, 2023, and finished on February 27, 2024, spanning 75 days. They used the Chudnovsky (1988) algorithm to calculate Pi, and the computation required a total memory of 1.36 TiB.

New challenges

The journey to 105 trillion digits of Pi – the new record – was not without fresh challenges. The team had to deal with performance-related issues, which led them to delve into the intricacies of parallel computing and hardware interactions. They discovered a CPU hazard specific to the Zen4 architecture involving super-alignment and its effects on memory access patterns.

The engineers also encountered a critical floating-point arithmetic error within the AVX512 code path of the N63 multiply algorithm. With remote assistance from the developer, Alexander Yee, they were able to diagnose and fix the problem, resulting in the successful computation.

Summing up, StorageReview’s Jordan Ranous noted, “The run to 105 trillion digits of Pi was much more complex than we expected. Upon reflection, we should have expected to encounter new issues; after all, we’re completing a computation that had never been done before. But with the 100 trillion computation completed with a much more “duct tape and chicken wire” configuration, we thought we had it made. Ultimately, it took a collaborative effort to get this rig across the finish line.”

Was it worth it? Ranous says, “While we rejoice with our partners in this record-breaking run, we must ask, “What does this even mean?” Five more trillion digits of Pi probably won’t make a huge difference to mathematics. Still, we can draw some lines between computational workloads and the need for modern underlying hardware to support them. Fundamentally, this exercise reflects that the proper hardware makes all the difference, whether an enterprise data center cluster or a large HPC installment. For the Pi computation, we were completely restricted by storage. Faster CPUs will help accelerate the math, but the limiting factor to many new world records is the amount of local storage in the box.”

You can watch the video of the record breaking attempt below.

‘What if the operating system is the problem’: Linux was never created for the cloud — so engineers developed DBOS, a new operating system that is part OS, part database

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Michael Stonebraker has developed several influential database management systems over the years, including Ingres, PostgreSQL, and VoltDB. Matei Zaharia is the creator of Apache Spark and co-founder and CTO of Databricks.

Working with a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, the pair have created a revolutionary prototype operating system called DBOS – DataBase OS.

The concept of DBOS was born three years ago when Stonebraker realized that the state an operating system must maintain (files, processes, threads, messages and so on) has grown exponentially since the early days of Unix. This, coupled with the limitations of Linux in the current technological landscape, sparked the idea of running the OS on top of a database.

DBOS Cloud

“When I heard a talk by Matei Zaharia in which he said Databricks could not use traditional OS scheduling technology at the scale they were running and had turned to a DBMS solution instead, it was clear that it was time to move the DBMS into the kernel and build a new operating system,” Stonebraker says.

As The Next Platform puts it, “Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and datastores in the DB Engines rankings and there are really only a handful of commercially viable operating systems. But what if the operating system is the problem?”

DBOS operates by coding operating system services in SQL on a high-performance distributed, transactional, fault-tolerant database management system (DBMS). As Stonebraker says, ‘This is in contrast to the traditional method of running the DBMS in user space on top of an OS without DBMS services”.

Created as a joint MIT-Stanford open source R&D project, the DBOS prototype demonstrated comparable performance to Linux, but with the addition of several notable features, including high availability, time travel, transactionality, fault tolerance, built-in multi-node scaling, SQL-accessible system state and observability data, and cyber resilience.

Following the successful prototyping of DBOS and securing funding, DBOS, Inc. was launched in April 2023, and the company has now released DBOS Cloud, a transactional serverless platform built on DBOS, designed for stateful TypeScript applications. DBOS Cloud offers key features from DBOS, such as reliable execution and time travel.

Reliable execution means that if a DBOS program is interrupted, it will automatically resume from where it left off, ensuring that no work is repeated and programs always run to completion. Time travel allows users to restore an application’s state to any point in the past, making it possible to reproduce rare bugs and run new code against a historical state.

DBOS Cloud is now available for anyone to try for free.

DBOS time travel

(Image credit: DBOS)