In a joint project with Booz Allen, today, Meta has deployed a customised version of its open-source Llama 3.2 model to the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory. The aim of Space Llama is to test the performance of on-orbit artificial intelligence in support of scientific research.
Since Llama’s full "model weights" are publicly available, researchers can install and run it on isolated hardware without an internet connection, an essential requirement aboard the ISS. This approach removes the need to route data through Earth-based servers, improving data security and reducing latency.
The Space Llama setup combines:
- Booz Allen’s A2E2 (AI for Edge Environments) framework
- Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Spaceborne Computer-2
- NVIDIA-accelerated computing (CUDA, cuDNN and cuBLAS)
- Meta’s Llama vision AI capabilities
Running on a compact, energy-efficient system similar to those used in satellites, the team reports that inference times for certain tasks have fallen from several minutes to just over one second.
Furthermore, Space Llama integrates both generative and multimodal AI. It can generate text or images from prompts and process mixed data types; text, visuals and audio. A practical use case is that it enables researchers to access essential technical reference documents and instructions directly, without requiring an internet connection.
This deployment follows Booz Allen’s August 2024 demonstration of a generative large language model (LLM) on the ISS using HPE’s Spaceborne Computer-2, and Meta’s November 2024 announcement that its fine-tuned Llama models would be made available to US government and private partners.
Bill Vass, Chief Technology Officer at Booz Allen, talked about the project, saying:
Space innovation has been limited historically due to reliance on Earth-based connectivity for compute and communications capabilities. Space Llama brings tools directly to the edge of space to quickly conduct critical repairs and maintain the ISS National Lab – propelling us towards a future of space-based science, discovery and the ability to operate at the farthest mission edge – space.
The Space Llama experiment is expected to inform future missions, including lunar and Martian exploration, and could influence the deployment of autonomous systems in remote or disconnected environments on Earth.
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