High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) Middleware Update

High Performance Spacecraft Computing (HPSC) is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to develop a high-performance multi-core radiation hardened flight processor. HPSC offers a new flight computing architecture to meet the needs of NASA missions through 2030 and beyond. Providing on the order of 100X the computational capacity of current flight processors for the same amount of power, the multicore architecture of the HPSC processor, or "Chiplet" provides unprecedented flexibility in a flight computing system by enabling the operating point to be set dynamically, trading among needs for computational performance, energy management and fault tolerance. The HPSC Chiplet is being developed by Boeing under contract to NASA, and is expected to provide prototypes, an evaluation board, system emulators, comprehensive system software, and a software development kit. In addition to the vendor deliverables, the AFRL is funding the development of a flexible Middleware to be developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The HPSC Middleware provides a suite of thirteen high level services to manage the compute, memory and I/O resources of this complex device.This presentation will provide an HPSC project update, an overview of the latest HPSC System Software release, an overview of HPSC Middleware Release 2, and a preview of the third HPSC Middleware release. The presentation will begin with a project update that will provide a look at the high-level changes since the project was introduced at the Flight Software Workshop last year. Next, the presentation will provide an overview of the current suite of HPSC System Software which includes the vendor provided bootloaders, operating systems, emulator, and development tools. Next, the HPSC Middleware progress will be presented, which includes an overview of the features and capabilities of HPSC Middleware Release 2, followed by a look at the reference flight software applications which utilize the Middleware. Finally, the presentation will give a preview of the HPSC Middleware Release 3

Fault Tolerant Nanosatellite Computing on a Budget

In this contribution, we present a CubeSat-compatible on-board computer (OBC) architecture that offers strong fault tolerance to enable the use of such spacecraft in critical and long-term missions. We describe in detail the design of our OBC’s breadboard setup, and document its composition from the component-level, all the way down to the software level. Fault tolerance in this OBC is achieved without resorting to radiation hardening, just intelligent through software. The OBC ages graceful, and makes use of FPGA-reconfiguration and mixed criticality. It can dynamically adapt to changing performance requirements throughout a space mission. We developed a proof-of-concept with several Xilinx Ultrascale and Ultrascale+ FPGAs. With the smallest Kintex Ultrascale+ KU3P device, we achieve 1.94W total power consumption at 300Mhz, well within the power budget range of current 2U CubeSats. To our knowledge, this is the first scalable and COTS-based, widely reproducible OBC solution which can offer strong fault coverage even for small CubeSats. To reproduce this OBC architecture, no custom-written, proprietary, or protected IP is needed, and the needed design tools are available free-of-charge to academics. All COTS components required to construct this architecture can be purchased on the open market, and are affordable even for academic and scientific CubeSat developers

Leros: A Tiny Microcontroller for FPGAs

Abstract—Leros is a tiny microcontroller that is optimized for current low-cost FPGAs. Leros is designed with a balanced logic to on-chip memory relation. The design goal is a microcontroller that can be clocked in about half of the speed a pipelined on-chip memory and consuming less than 300 logic cells. The architecture, which follows from the design goals, is a pipelined 16-bit accumulator processor. An implementation of Leros needs at least one on-chip memory block and a few hundred logic cells. The application areas of Leros are twofold: First, it can be used as an intelligent peripheral device for auxiliary functions in an FPGA based system-on-chip design. Second, the very small size of Leros makes it an attractive softcore for many-core research with low-cost FPGAs. I

Approaches to multiprocessor error recovery using an on-chip interconnect subsystem

For future multicores, a dedicated interconnect subsystem for on-chip monitors was found to be highly beneficial in terms of scalability, performance and area. In this thesis, such a monitor network (MNoC) is used for multicores to support selective error identification and recovery and maintain target chip reliability in the context of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS). A selective shared memory multiprocessor recovery is performed using MNoC in which, when an error is detected, only the group of processors sharing an application with the affected processors are recovered. Although the use of DVFS in contemporary multicores provides significant protection from unpredictable thermal events, a potential side effect can be an increased processor exposure to soft errors. To address this issue, a flexible fault prevention and recovery mechanism has been developed to selectively enable a small amount of per-core dual modular redundancy (DMR) in response to increased vulnerability, as measured by the processor architectural vulnerability factor (AVF). Our new algorithm for DMR deployment aims to provide a stable effective soft error rate (SER) by using DMR in response to DVFS caused by thermal events. The algorithm is implemented in real-time on the multicore using MNoC and controller which evaluates thermal information and multicore performance statistics in addition to error information. DVFS experiments with a multicore simulator using standard benchmarks show an average 6% improvement in overall power consumption and a stable SER by using selective DMR versus continuous DMR deployment

GA-Based fault diagnosis algorithms for distributed systems

Distributed Systems are becoming very popular day-by-day due to their applications in various fields such as electronic automotives, remote environment control like underwater sensor network, K-connected networks. Faults may aect the nodes of the system at any time. So diagnosing the faulty nodes in the distributed system is an worst necessity to make the system more reliable and ecient. This thesis describes about dierent types of faults, system and fault model, those are already in literature. As the evolutionary approaches give optimum outcome than probabilistic approaches, we have developed Genetic algorithm based fault diagnosis algorithm which provides better result than other fault diagnosis algorithms. The GA-based fault diagnosis algorithm has worked upon dierent types of faults like permanent as well as intermittent faults in a K-connected system. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Genetic Algorithm Based Permanent Fault Diagnosis Algorithm(GAPFDA) and Genetic Algorithm Based Intermittent Fault Diagnosis Algorithm (GAIFDA) decreases the number of messages transferred and the time needed to diagnose the faulty nodes in a K-connected distributed system. The decrease in CPU time and number of steps are due to the application of supervised mutation in the fault diagnosis algorithms. The time complexity and message complexity of GAPFDA are analyzed as O(n*P*K*ng) and O(n*K) respectively. The time complexity and message complexity of GAIFDA are O(r*n*P*K*ng) and O(r*n*K) respectively, where ’n’ is the number of nodes, ’P’ is the population size, ’K’ is the connectivity of the network, ’ng’ is the number of generations (steps), ’r’ is the number of rounds. Along with the design of fault diagnosis algorithm of O(r*k) for diagnosing the transient-leading-to-permanent faults in the actuators of a k-fault tolerant Fly-by-wire(FBW) system, an ecient scheduling algorithm has been developed to schedule dierent tasks of a FBW system, here ’r’ denotes the number of rounds. The proposed algorithm for scheduling the task graphs of a multi-rate FBW system demonstrates that, maximization in microcontroller’s execution period reduces the number of microcontrollers needed for performing diagnosis

Low power processor architecture and multicore approach for embedded systems

13301甲第4319号博士（工学）金沢大学博士論文本文Full 以下に掲載：1.IEICE Transactions Vol. E98-C(7) pp.544-549 2015. IEICE. 共著者： S. Otani, H. Kondo. /2.Reuse 許可エビデンス送

Radiation Testing of a Multiprocessor Macrosynchronized Lockstep Architecture With FreeRTOS

Nowadays, high-performance microprocessors are demanded in many fields, including those with high-reliability requirements. Commercial microprocessors present a good tradeoff between cost, size, and performance, albeit they must be adapted to satisfy the reliability requirements when they are used in harsh environments. This work presents a high-end multiprocessor hardened with macrosynchronized lockstep and additional protections. A commercial dual-core Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) cortex A9 has been used as a case study and a complete hardened system has been developed. Evaluation of the proposed hardened system has been accomplished with exhaustive fault injection campaigns and proton irradiation. The hardening approach has been accomplished for both baremetal applications and operating system (OS)-based. The hardened system has demonstrated high reliability in all performed experiments with error coverage up to 99.3% in the irradiation experiments. Experimental irradiation results demonstrate a cross-sectional reduction of two orders of magnitude.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Project PID2019-106455GB-C21 and in part by the Community of Madrid under Project 49.520608.9.18Publicad

병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을 위한 모델 기반 코드 생성 프레임워크

학위논문(박사)--서울대학교 대학원 :공과대학 컴퓨터공학부,2020. 2. 하순회.소프트웨어 설계 생산성 및 유지보수성을 향상시키기 위해 다양한 소프트웨어 개발 방법론이 제안되었지만, 대부분의 연구는 응용 소프트웨어를 하나의 프로세서에서 동작시키는 데에 초점을 맞추고 있다. 또한, 임베디드 시스템을 개발하는 데에 필요한 지연이나 자원 요구 사항에 대한 비기능적 요구 사항을 고려하지 않고 있기 때문에 일반적인 소프트웨어 개발 방법론을 임베디드 소프트웨어를 개발하는 데에 적용하는 것은 적합하지 않다. 이 논문에서는 병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을 대상으로 하는 소프트웨어를 모델로 표현하고, 이를 소프트웨어 분석이나 개발에 활용하는 개발 방법론을 소개한다. 우리의 모델에서 응용 소프트웨어는 계층적으로 표현할 수 있는 여러 개의 태스크로 이루어져 있으며, 하드웨어 플랫폼과 독립적으로 명세한다. 태스크 간의 통신 및 동기화는 모델이 정의한 규약이 정해져 있고, 이러한 규약을 통해 실제 프로그램을 실행하기 전에 소프트웨어 에러를 정적 분석을 통해 확인할 수 있고, 이는 응용의 검증 복잡도를 줄이는 데에 기여한다. 지정한 하드웨어 플랫폼에서 동작하는 프로그램은 태스크들을 프로세서에 매핑한 이후에 자동적으로 합성할 수 있다. 위의 모델 기반 소프트웨어 개발 방법론에서 사용하는 프로그램 합성기를 본 논문에서 제안하였는데, 명세한 플랫폼 요구 사항을 바탕으로 병렬 및 분산 임베디드 시스템을에서 동작하는 코드를 생성한다. 여러 개의 정형적 모델들을 계층적으로 표현하여 응용의 동적 행태를 나타고, 합성기는 여러 모델로 구성된 계층적인 모델로부터 병렬성을 고려하여 태스크를 실행할 수 있다. 또한, 프로그램 합성기에서 다양한 플랫폼이나 네트워크를 지원할 수 있도록 코드를 관리하는 방법도 보여주고 있다. 본 논문에서 제시하는 소프트웨어 개발 방법론은 6개의 하드웨어 플랫폼과 3 종류의 네트워크로 구성되어 있는 실제 감시 소프트웨어 시스템 응용 예제와 이종 멀티 프로세서를 활용하는 원격 딥 러닝 예제를 수행하여 개발 방법론의 적용 가능성을 시험하였다. 또한, 프로그램 합성기가 새로운 플랫폼이나 네트워크를 지원하기 위해 필요로 하는 개발 비용도 실제 측정 및 예측하여 상대적으로 적은 노력으로 새로운 플랫폼을 지원할 수 있음을 확인하였다. 많은 임베디드 시스템에서 예상치 못한 하드웨어 에러에 대해 결함을 감내하는 것을 필요로 하기 때문에 결함 감내에 대한 코드를 자동으로 생성하는 연구도 진행하였다. 본 기법에서 결함 감내 설정에 따라 태스크 그래프를 수정하는 방식을 활용하였으며, 결함 감내의 비기능적 요구 사항을 응용 개발자가 쉽게 적용할 수 있도록 하였다. 또한, 결함 감내 지원하는 것과 관련하여 실제 수동으로 구현했을 경우와 비교하였고, 결함 주입 도구를 이용하여 결함 발생 시나리오를 재현하거나, 임의로 결함을 주입하는 실험을 수행하였다. 마지막으로 결함 감내를 실험할 때에 활용한 결함 주입 도구는 본 논문의 또 다른 기여 사항 중 하나로 리눅스 환경으로 대상으로 응용 영역 및 커널 영역에 결함을 주입하는 도구를 개발하였다. 시스템의 견고성을 검증하기 위해 결함을 주입하여 결함 시나리오를 재현하는 것은 널리 사용되는 방법으로, 본 논문에서 개발된 결함 주입 도구는 시스템이 동작하는 도중에 재현 가능한 결함을 주입할 수 있는 도구이다. 커널 영역에서의 결함 주입을 위해 두 종류의 결함 주입 방법을 제공하며, 하나는 커널 GNU 디버거를 이용한 방법이고, 다른 하나는 ARM 하드웨어 브레이크포인트를 활용한 방법이다. 응용 영역에서 결함을 주입하기 위해 GDB 기반 결함 주입 방법을 이용하여 동일 시스템 혹은 원격 시스템의 응용에 결함을 주입할 수 있다. 결함 주입 도구에 대한 실험은 ODROID-XU4 보드에서 진행하였다.While various software development methodologies have been proposed to increase the design productivity and maintainability of software, they usually focus on the development of application software running on a single processing element, without concern about the non-functional requirements of an embedded system such as latency and resource requirements. In this thesis, we present a model-based software development method for parallel and distributed embedded systems. An application is specified as a set of tasks that follow a set of given rules for communication and synchronization in a hierarchical fashion, independently of the hardware platform. Having such rules enables us to perform static analysis to check some software errors at compile time to reduce the verification difficulty. Platform-specific program is synthesized automatically after mapping of tasks onto processing elements is determined. The program synthesizer is also proposed to generate codes which satisfies platform requirements for parallel and distributed embedded systems. As multiple models which can express dynamic behaviors can be depicted hierarchically, the synthesizer supports to manage multiple task graphs with a different hierarchy to run tasks with parallelism. Also, the synthesizer shows methods of managing codes for heterogeneous platforms and generating various communication methods. The viability of the proposed software development method is verified with a real-life surveillance application that runs on six processing elements with three remote communication methods, and remote deep learning example is conducted to use heterogeneous multiprocessing components on distributed systems. Also, supporting a new platform and network requires a small effort by measuring and estimating development costs. Since tolerance to unexpected errors is a required feature of many embedded systems, we also support an automatic fault-tolerant code generation. Fault tolerance can be applied by modifying the task graph based on the selected fault tolerance configurations, so the non-functional requirement of fault tolerance can be easily adopted by an application developer. To compare the effort of supporting fault tolerance, manual implementation of fault tolerance is performed. Also, the fault tolerance method is tested with the fault injection tool to emulate fault scenarios and inject faults randomly. Our fault injection tool, which has used for testing our fault-tolerance method, is another work of this thesis. Emulating fault scenarios by intentionally injecting faults is commonly used to test and verify the robustness of a system. To emulate faults on an embedded system, we present a run-time fault injection framework that can inject a fault on both a kernel and application layer of Linux-based systems. For injecting faults on a kernel layer, two complementary fault injection techniques are used. One is based on Kernel GNU Debugger, and the other is using a hardware breakpoint supported by the ARM architecture. For application-level fault injection, the GDB-based fault injection method is used to inject a fault on a remote application. The viability of the proposed fault injection tool is proved by real-life experiments with an ODROID-XU4 system.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Contribution 6 1.3 Dissertation Organization 8 Chapter 2 Background 9 2.1 HOPES: Hope of Parallel Embedded Software 9 2.1.1 Software Development Procedure 9 2.1.2 Components of HOPES 12 2.2 Universal Execution Model 13 2.2.1 Task Graph Specification 13 2.2.2 Dataflow specification of an Application 15 2.2.3 Task Code Specification and Generic APIs 21 2.2.4 Meta-data Specification 23 Chapter 3 Program Synthesis for Parallel and Distributed Embedded Systems 24 3.1 Motivational Example 24 3.2 Program Synthesis Overview 26 3.3 Program Synthesis from Hierarchically-mixed Models 30 3.4 Platform Code Synthesis 33 3.5 Communication Code Synthesis 36 3.6 Experiments 40 3.6.1 Development Cost of Supporting New Platforms and Networks 40 3.6.2 Program Synthesis for the Surveillance System Example 44 3.6.3 Remote GPU-accelerated Deep Learning Example 46 3.7 Document Generation 48 3.8 Related Works 49 Chapter 4 Model Transformation for Fault-tolerant Code Synthesis 56 4.1 Fault-tolerant Code Synthesis Techniques 56 4.2 Applying Fault Tolerance Techniques in HOPES 61 4.3 Experiments 62 4.3.1 Development Cost of Applying Fault Tolerance 62 4.3.2 Fault Tolerance Experiments 62 4.4 Random Fault Injection Experiments 65 4.5 Related Works 68 Chapter 5 Fault Injection Framework for Linux-based Embedded Systems 70 5.1 Background 70 5.1.1 Fault Injection Techniques 70 5.1.2 Kernel GNU Debugger 71 5.1.3 ARM Hardware Breakpoint 72 5.2 Fault Injection Framework 74 5.2.1 Overview 74 5.2.2 Architecture 75 5.2.3 Fault Injection Techniques 79 5.2.4 Implementation 83 5.3 Experiments 90 5.3.1 Experiment Setup 90 5.3.2 Performance Comparison of Two Fault Injection Methods 90 5.3.3 Bit-flip Fault Experiments 92 5.3.4 eMMC Controller Fault Experiments 94 Chapter 6 Conclusion 97 Bibliography 99 요 약 108Docto