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First Beowulf Cluster in Space

Issue 137

From Issue #137
September 2005

Jul 28, 2005  By Ian McLoughlin, Timo Bretschneider and Bharath Ramesh
 in
When a satellite's image-gathering power exceeds the bandwidth available to transmit the images, a Linux cluster right on the satellite helps decide which images to send back to Earth.
Launch into a New Space Era

From an engineer's perspective, X-Sat and its PPU couldn't succeed without Linux: almost all current application developments in the area of remote sensing use Linux, as do most modern cluster systems. So, sometime in early 2007, if you tilt your head back at the right time, you might be caught on camera, processed and downloaded, thanks to Linux.

Resources for this article: /article/8399.

Ian's been using Linux since about 1856 and weaned his kids at the penguin's electronic teat. His interests include satellites and signal processing, and his career objective is to lose his job and become a missionary in China.

Although Timo didn't try to wean his daughter on the penguin, he uses Linux for most of his number-crunching problems on Beowulf clusters and in the future even more extensively in space. Timo's research focus is remote sensing and various image-processing problems, well, unless he's gone traveling.

Bharath designs high-performance systems for Hewlett-Packard. Not being very high-performance himself, he relies on the pet monkey under his desk to come up with hardware designs. Occasionally, it also writes articles for magazines with penguins on their cover.

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