A report discusses the continuing development of a scalable multiprocessor computing system for hard real-time applications aboard a spacecraft. "Hard real-time applications" signifies applications, like real-time radar signal processing, in which the data to be processed are generated at "hundreds" of pulses per second, each pulse "requiring" millions of arithmetic operations. In these applications, the digital processors must be tightly integrated with analog instrumentation (e.g., radar equipment), and data input/output must be synchronized with analog instrumentation, controlled to within fractions of a microsecond. The scalable multiprocessor is a cluster of identical commercial-off- the-shelf generic DSP (digital-signal- processing) computers plus generic interface circuits, including analog-to-digital converters, all controlled by software. The processors are computers interconnected by high-speed serial links. Performance can be increased by adding hardware modules and correspondingly modifying the software. Work is distributed among the processors in a parallel or pipeline fashion by means of a flexible master/slave control and timing scheme. Each processor operates under its own local clock; synchronization is achieved by broadcasting master time signals to all the processors, which compute offsets between the master clock and their local clocks.

This work was done by James Lux, Minh Lang, Kouji Nishimoto, Douglas Clark, Dorothy Stosic, Alex Bachmann, William Wilkinson, and Richard Steffke of Caltech for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory . The software used in this innovation is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Don Hart of the California Institute of Technology at (818) 393-3425. Refer to NPO-40270.



This Brief includes a Technical Support Package (TSP).
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Scalable Multiprocessor for High-Speed Computing in Space

(reference NPO40270) is currently available for download from the TSP library.

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