NASA leverages Dell’s HPC for Mars ‘Mission Curiosity’

Launched late last year the Mars Rover - Curiosity landed on the Red Planet last week and it landed near the base of a mountain inside the Gale Crater near the Martian equator. Researchers plan to use Curiosity to study the mountain's layers which hold evidence about the wet environments of early Mars and may hold clues about whether the planet ever offered conditions favorable for life. The rolling laboratory will search for two things: environments where life might have existed, and the capacity of those environments to preserve evidence of past life.

As Curiosity started beaming the images the researchers rejoiced. But the entire mission was made possible due to the state of the art computing infrastructure at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that secured the safe landing of Curiosity. For one JPL used High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters to test and validate the Mars rover's landing sequence. And computer Major Dell is really excited because JPL used Dell's hardware for the same. For instance, Dell supported the landing of NASA's new Mars rover, claimed to be the most complicated portion of the mission, with data analysis conducted in two NASA High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters running Dell PowerEdge servers.

According to sources, JPL's Dell HPC clusters, Galaxy and Nebula, provided vital support to NASA's Curiosity rover in analyzing the vast amounts of test data needed to correctly prepare the rover for entering the Martian atmosphere and landing it on the planet. This difficult task was powered by Dell PowerEdge servers that make up the Galaxy and Nebula clusters. The final landing sequence parameters developed by the mission team, which was tested and validated using the Dell HPC clusters, were uploaded last week to Curiosity.

According to Jere Carroll, general manager civilian agencies, Dell Federal, "We are proud to work hand-in-hand with NASA, a true American institution that provides the world with the understanding that modern day pioneering delivers optimism and the drive to go further. This notion echoes Dell's mission to provide customers with a full spectrum of IT hardware and services, helping them to accomplish their mission more effectively and efficiently. Most importantly, we are honored to be able to test and validate this mission's most critical portion, landing on the Red Planet"