A new petabyte data centre planned for the International Space Station in 2027 will open up new ways for satellites, spacecraft and astronauts to store and process data.
The optically-interconnected Axiom Orbital Data Center Node, constructed around eight 122.88Tb enterprise-class SSDs from Phison Electronics, is a collaboration between Axiom, Skyloom and Phison and will allow users to run AI and machine learning workloads and other cloud computing applications from Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
While the drives and server will be located within the ISS, the 2.5Gbps Optical Communication Terminal (OCT) mounted on the outside of the ISS will allow network access from other satellites and spacecraft, giving the hardware connectivity to satellites in the mesh network.
OCT supplier Skyloom says the Space Development Agency Tranche 1-compatible OCT is the “first step” towards future 100Gbps connectivity in LEO, providing telco-grade low-latency communications access for transporting data from space back to Earth.
The architecture and engineering design of the orbital data centre is led by Spacebilt, which is also delivering its Large In-Space Servers (LiSS), representing the first deployment of petabyte-class servers in space with Phison Pascari enterprise class SSDs along with Microchip Technology’s PIC64 High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (PIC64-HPSC), providing the servers and the AxDCU-1 networked access to the OCTs.
Axiom Space plans to have at least three Orbital Data Center (ODC) nodes in orbit by 2027, all interconnected and interoperable and offering services to any satellite or spacecraft with compatible OCTs.
“This is part of our roadmap for a distributed and federated network of ODC nodes, steadily increasing data storage and processing capacity available to national security, civil, commercial and international clients anywhere in LEO,” explains Jason Aspiotis, Global Director of In-space Data and Security at Axiom Space.
K.S. Pua, CEO and Founder, Phison Electronics says his firm is committed to “enabling storage in space as the next data frontier”
“Pascari delivers petabyte-class storage, tested for the harsh environments in space and primed to travel to low-Earth orbit for the first time. This milestone demonstrates how our innovations in high-performance storage are extending beyond data centers on Earth to enable the next era of space-based computing and AI,” he says.
Orbital and lunar data centres have attracted great attention in recent months, with many firms espousing the benefits of storing data in the cold environment of space. But while mainstream media covers the “storage” aspect, space analysts say the breakthrough application for “data centres in space” is in-orbit processing, with space-hardened chips and storage and low-latency in-orbit communication.
Starcloud, for example, has garnered much press on the concept of lunar data centres but is primarily focussing hard on providing in-orbit processing services, with space-hardened chips and storage and low-latency in-orbit communication.
