The University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) supercomputer MeluXina. Photo via SES. 

SES has been involved in tests to optimize satellite performance and allocate spectrum, working with researchers at the University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT). SES gained early access to Luxembourg’s supercomputer MeluXina in order to carry out these tests, the satellite operator announced Monday.

The joint SES-SnT project includes modeling and optimizing performance and radio spectrum usage for broadband satellite communications systems. MeluXina is ranked among the top 50 installations of its kind worldwide and is capable of executing millions of billions of calculations per second.

SES CTO Ruy Pinto said this research will optimize the performance for SES’s next-generation satellites SES-17 and O3b mPOWER and generate optimization scenarios that will allow SES to give customers better service.

“Working with SES gives our researchers the opportunity to work with cutting-edge industry solutions, like their O3b mPOWER system, ensuring our innovative research is relevant for real-world applications. MeluXina’s computational power enabled the project team to scale up the complexity of their work, investigating optimisation scenarios that would not be realistic to consider with normal computers,” Björn Ottersten, director of SnT, said in a statement.