「 Voyager was the first unmanned mission to include distributed computing, partly because the sheer number of tasks to be executed with precision during the high-stakes planetary fly-bys would exceed the capabilities of any single computer that could be made flyable. There was a social engineering angle to this as well, in that it kept the various engineering teams from competing for resources from a single computer 」
A thing that makes the #Voyager bugfix so compelling: at no point has "throw more GPUs/nodes/buckets/bandwidth at it" been a solution. Not at any budget.
@floe I think the craziest part is how the dev environment looks like. I heard they literally have to go through archives to find the original engineering notes and that there is no working replica of Voyager 1 on earth so very hard to test beforehand.
Read a few of the stories about #Voyager 1’s memory problems, but people don’t say how it was organized.
If the failed chip contained whole words, then just that chunk of memory would fail. If it contained one bit of many words, all those words would be affected.
That suggests a design rule for long running spacecraft - use whole word memory devices so a failure doesn’t knock out even more memory. Same for chip design, put related bits nearby on the chip. Wonder if they have this rule…
@AGMS00 man it’s crazy for me to even wrap my head around. I’m barely even a Ruby programmer I cannot wrap my head around something as complex as working on software for a spacecraft like a light year away with tech from the 70’s
I bet that was tricky. It’s over 15 billion miles away, 24 billion kilometers. 136.3 AU. Almost nineteen light-hours away. That’s pretty far.
The probe is 47 years old. Younger than me! If I’d gotten my shit together, I could be at least 140 AU out from the sun by now. Well, I didn’t. Another opportunity passed me by. #Voyager#VoyagerI
:thinkerguns: NASA knows what knocked Voyager 1 offline, but it will take a while to fix | @arstechnica
「 The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing 」