Kioxia was spun off from Toshiba Corporation in June 2018. In the early 1980s, when it was part of the Japanese conglomerate, the company was credited as the inventor of flash memory. Now, Kioxia is bringing the same storage technology into orbit.
In partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Kioxia recently sent more than 130TB of SSD storage capacity to the International Space Station (ISS). The Japanese memory maker has outfitted an updated HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 with multiple solid-state storage drives, giving astronauts aboard the International Space Station powerful flash memory and unprecedented computing power.
Chioscia explained that HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 is mainly based on off-the-shelf commercial technology to provide high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities in space. Before the ISS can utilize its own "local" supercomputer, astronauts must send all experimental data to Earth for processing.
Thanks to the Kioxia-HPE partnership, ISS residents can now process and analyze data directly in situ, with 30,000 times fewer downloads. Kioxia explained that the HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 is designed to perform a variety of HPC experimental workloads in space, including healthcare, natural disaster recovery, 3D printing, 5G communications, artificial intelligence, and more.
Kioxia offers the full data storage capabilities of HPE supercomputers, including enterprise-class SAS drives and traditional NVMe drives. HPE Spaceborne Computer-2 includes eight 1TB NVMe drives, four 960GB SASSSDs, and four enterprise-class SASSSDs, with a single capacity of 30.72TB. The overall storage capacity exceeds 130TB, Kioxia said, which is the most data storage in a single mission on the International Space Station.
Kioxia highlighted how solid-state storage drives are better suited for space-based missions than traditional magnetic hard drives because they can better meet the power, performance and reliability requirements of "outer space." SSDs have no moving parts and are much faster than hard drives. Hard drives have proven their ability to work reliably in space in the past, but flash memory is certainly the better solution at the moment.
Kioxia will monitor the flash memory on Space Computer-2 on a daily basis throughout the mission. Daily log files will be streamed from the International Space Station to the ground so engineers can track and analyze the drive's health data to better understand how flash-based storage devices are actually operating in space.