Demand for high-performance computing in spaceflight applications is accelerating the development of next-generation processors for space. These processors, including Boeing's High-Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) and Xilinx's Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs, offer feature-rich and multi-core ARM Cortex-A53 processors with hardware extensions for efficient execution and isolation of virtualized systems. This capability for virtualization enables new opportunities for enhanced fault tolerance through system-level redundancy of complete flight-software systems. In this paper, we present Virtualized Space Applications (ViSA), a framework leveraging the Xen hypervisor for deploying software-based fault tolerance for flight systems. We evaluate and analyze ViSA's enhancements to reliability and availability of the system in both an experimental lab setting and under neutron radiation-beam testing at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE). As a case study, we investigate software-based replication and voting on the core Flight Executive (cFE) suite of flight software from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) on the ViSA framework.
Towards resilient spaceflight systems with virtualization
2018-03-01
694667 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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