Post-TRL6 Dependable Multiprocessor technology developments

Abstract

Funded by the NASA New Millennium Program (NMP) Space Technology 8 (ST8) project since 2004, the Dependable Multiprocessor (DM) project is a major step toward NASA's and DoD's long-held desire to fly Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology in space to take advantage of the higher performance and lower cost of COTS-based onboard processing solutions. The development of DM technology represents a significant paradigm shift. For applications that only need to be radiation tolerant, DM technology allows the user to fly 10x – 100x the processing capability of designs implemented with radiation hardened technologies. As a software-based, platform and technology-independent technology, DM allows space missions to keep pace with COTS developments. As a result, the processing technologies used in space applications no longer need to be 2 – 3 generations behind state-of-the-art terrestrial processing technologies. The DM project conducted its TRL6 Technology Validation in 2008 and 2009. The preliminary DM TRL6 technology validation demonstration was conducted in September of 2008. The results of the preliminary TRL6 technology validation demonstration were described in a paper presented at the 2009 IEEE Aerospace Conference [5]. The final TRL6 results are provided in [1], [2], and [3]. This paper includes a brief overview of DM technology and a brief overview of the overall TRL6 effort, but focuses on the 2009 TRL6 effort. The 2009 effort includes system-level radiation testing and post-TRL6 technology enhancements. Post-TRL6 enhancements include an upgraded DM implementation with enhanced data integrity protection, coordinated checkpointing, repetitive transient fault detection, Open MPI, true open system HAM (High Availability Middleware), and an updated flight configuration which is not subject to the constraints of the original ST8 spacecraft. 1, 2, 3