REE: a COTS-based fault tolerant parallel processing supercomputer for spacecraft onboard scientific data analysis

NASA's future spaceborne science missions will require supercomputing capabilities for both near earth and deep space exploration. Limited downlink bandwidth and excessive round trip communication delays limit the capabilities and science value of missions which rely on terrestrial supercomputing resources. The difficulty encountered is that radiation-hardened components are both extremely expensive and lag several generations behind the commercial state of the art. The goal of the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) project, part of NASA's HPCC program, is to migrate ground-based commercial supercomputing technology into space in a timely and cost-effective manner. Reaching this goal will enable new classes of science missions and make feasible the next major thrust in space exploration. The approach being taken on the REE project is to exploit a comprehensive architecture strategy to enable direct insertion of the prevailing generation of state of the art commercial (hardware/software) components in future space systems. The use of state of the art commercial hardware, coupled with a software-based fault tolerance strategy will allow high throughput computation even in the presence of relatively high rates of radiation-induced transient upsets as well as in the presence of permanent faults. The authors outline the overall project plan and status, and review the architecture of the First Generation Testbed.