Abstract

This proposal addresses NASA's Earth Science missions and its underlying needs for high performance, scalable on-board processing. The decadal survey missions stressed higher resolution instruments and persistent measurements, which drove computing needs up by 100-1,000 x. Our AIST-14 SpaceCubeX effort developed a framework which supported rapid trade space exploration of on-board heterogeneous computing solutions (Multi-core CPUs coupled with DSP or FPGA co-processors) across a benchmark suite of Earth Science applications, achieving 20-20,000 x performance improvements. Today, measurement capabilities emerging from the upcoming 2017 decadal survey such as distributed sensing, data continuity, multi-satellite constellations, and intelligent sensor control will require an additional 10-100x increase in onboard computing performance.

Date

2016

Authors

Matthew French

Journal

NASA Proposal ID. 16-AIST16-0031

Pages

31