Title :
Design of a fault-tolerant parallel processor
Author :
Racine, Roger ; LeBlanc, Michael ; Beilin, Samuel
Author_Institution :
C. S. Draper Lab. Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA
Abstract :
The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, under contract to the NASA Johnson Space Center, has developed a Fault-Tolerant Parallel Processor (FTPP) for use on the NASA X-38 experimental vehicle. Using commercial processor boards and the industry-standard VME backplane, the system is configured as a quadruplet Flight-Critical Processor (FCP) and five simplex Instrumentation Control Processors (ICPs). The FCP is Byzantine resilient for any two non-simultaneous permanent faults, and for any number of non-simultaneous recoverable faults, as long as a maximum of one other fault condition occurs during the recovery process (only two recoveries can be in progress at once). This paper focuses on some of the hardware and software design of the Fault-Tolerant System Services (FTSS) that isolate, as much as possible, the redundancy of the FCP from the application software, such as the guidance, navigation and flight control software, on the X-38 FTPP. FTSS also performs reconfiguration and recovery functions.
Keywords :
aerospace computing; fault tolerant computing; parallel architectures; parallel machines; redundancy; space vehicle electronics; synchronisation; system recovery; timing; Byzantine resilience; COTS processor boards; ISS crew return vehicle; International Space Station; NASA; NASA X-3 8 experimental vehicle; commercial processor boards; fault-tolerant parallel processor; hardware design; industry-standard VME backplane; nonsimultaneous permanent faults; nonsimultaneous recoverable faults; quadruplet flight-critical processor; recovery process; redundancy level; simplex instrumentation control processors; software design; timing constraints; voting mechanism; Backplanes; Contracts; Electrical equipment industry; Fault tolerance; Industrial control; Instruments; Laboratories; NASA; Process control; Space vehicles;
Conference_Titel :
Digital Avionics Systems Conference, 2002. Proceedings. The 21st
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-7367-7
DOI :
10.1109/DASC.2002.1053013