Researchers, corporations, and government entities are seeking to deploy increasingly compute-intensive workloads on space platforms. This need is driving the development of two new radiation-hardened, multi-core space processors, the BAE Systems RAD5545™ processor and the Boeing High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor. As these systems remained in the development phase, the Freescale P5020DS and P5040DS systems, based on the same PowerPC e5500 architecture as the RAD5545 processor, and the Hardkernel ODROID-C2, sharing the same ARM Cortex-A53 core as the HPSC processor, were selected as facsimiles for evaluation. Several OpenMP-parallelized applications, including a color search, Sobel filter, Mandelbrot set generator, hyperspectral imaging target classifier, and image thumbnailer, were benchmarked on these processing platforms. Performance and energy consumption results on these facsimiles were scaled to forecasted frequencies of the radiation-hardened devices in development. In these studies, the RAD5545 achieved the highest and most consistent parallel efficiency, up to 99%. The HPSC processor achieved faster execution times, averaging about half that of the RAD5545 processor, with lower energy consumption. The evaluated applications reached up to 3.9 speedup across four cores. The frequency-scaling methods were validated by comparing the set of scaled measures with data points from an underclocked facsimile, which yielded an average accuracy of 97% between estimated and measured results. These performance outcomes help to establish the capabilities of both the RAD5545 and HPSC processors for on-board parallel processing of computationally-demanding applications for future space missions.
Comparative Benchmarking Analysis of Next-Generation Space Processors
2019-03-01
2164487 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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