MUSE: a message passing concurrent computer for on-board space systems

Abstract

Satellite payloads of the near future will raise the need of very powerful and dependable computers. No embeddable monoprocessor will be able to satisfy such computing power need. Thus those computers will be multi-processor systems. Satellite payloads must meet high availability requirements rather then reliability ones. This allows the use of fail stop reconfigurable computers. This paper describes the MUSE architecture, a reconfigurable multi-processor computer designed to support signal processing applications in space systems.