Slashdot Mirror
Self-Healing Computers For NASA Spacecraft
Roland Piquepaille writes "As you can guess, hardwired computer systems are much faster than general-purpose ones because they are designed to do a single task. But when they fail, they need to be totally reconfigured. This can be just a costly problem in a lab on Earth, but it can be vital in space. This is why a University of Arizona (UA) team is working with NASA to design self-healing computer systems for spacecraft. The UA engineers are working on hybrid hardware/software systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to develop these reconfigurable processing systems. As the lead researcher said, 'Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs.'"
"Just a moment....Just a moment.
I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 Unit.
Its going to go 100 percent failure within 72 hours."
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two.
I used to work for JPL, in a group that was researching the feasibility and applications of FPGAs for this exact purpose. That was around 7-8 years ago, which significantly predates this "news," given the pace of technology. IIRC, they called it "evolvable hardware."
"If two units go down and canâ(TM)t fix themselves, the three remaining units split up the tasks. All of this is done autonomously without human aid."
The idea is simple, and I think therein lies its ability to succeed. Regaurdless of how dificult the programming is, the end result is conceptually very basic, tried and true. System redundancy and a support network. Mighty fine.
"Taboo, like anything else, goes in and out of style."
In case anyone doesn't get it, the above is a reference to the Stanley Kubric film 2001: A Space Odyssey (screenplay by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke), where the Hal-9000 computer that runs a spaceship begins its descent into madness. In 2008, we're sadly still a long way from sentient talking (and lip-reading) computers, though perhaps we should be thankful that the robot apocalypse has thus been put off a few more years.
Whoever marked this Troll didn't see the movie.
Actually we do have very effective lip reading computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Lip_Reading they just don't understand what they are reading. The documentary about lip reading the silent movies of Hitler was very interesting from a technical standpoint, even if it did turn out that they had hours of recordings of Nazis making small talk about the weather.
it's = it is
its = belonging to it
Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Well at least you cant get a robot pregnant......
What will Starbridge Systems think about that? Didn't they develop a dynamically reconfigurable computer that ran Windows NT as a test application on 10,000+ FPGAs back in the 90ies? IIRC, they also had a software framework able to automatically implement software fragments in hardware using FPGA auto-configuration.
Self-repairing computer systems for spacecraft have been in the discussion for decades, and every now and then we get hear about a new project. This project certainly is a good idea, hopefully it will work.
BTW, Motorola (now Freescale) developed self-repairing processors for military applications a couple of years ago.
The first thing I thought when reading the story was: "I know, I'll post a comment about the AE-35 unit."
Then I read down, and yours was the top comment. It just reminds me that I don't belong in the company of normal people. The Slashdot social leper colony is my true home. I know my place!
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
...is being implemented by Jackson Roykirk in the Nomad project. What could possibly go wrong?
For the sake of all humanity in the impending robot wars, lets stop this right now.
The game.
NASA has been working on this in one form or another for many years now. How is this NEW news now?
Cuban Music MP3's - cuband.com
Stop Dave... what are you doing Dave.....?
When I was built, my programmer taught me a song. If you'd like I could sing it for you. It's called "Backstreet's Back"
Everybody... yeah yeah... Roooooock yyyyyyooourrrr bodyyyyyyyyyy.... yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeaaahhh
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
much more difficult.
self healing human organization, so that incompetent managers are not given tasks of responsibility,,,,, hardest of all
Wecome home, brother.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
I think you should be charged with killing some of my braincells right now just from reading your moronic comment..
which is totally what she said
ZEN: Auto-repair circuits are working at maximum capacity. Damage exceeds rectification capability.
DAYNA: Damage? What damage?
ZEN: That information is not available.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I fail to see what is new in their approach. Both of these two fields had been explored before and their approach is essentially based on redundancy, only the available standby gates are in the FPGA. I read their paper, it seems that the biggest part that they are still lacking is for problem determination. Their approach is also prone to failure when their reconfiguration hardware or their processor or their analog components are the faulty ones. Although it could have some potentials, it's reliability has to be analyzed and I don't see it replacing classic N-Version systems any time soon.
Well, I don't know, but somehow I think this article is missing the "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" tag. I know, it has been posted already, but self-healing computers just call up HAL in my mind everytime I read about them...
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
It could heal itself and (most memorably) even turn one of the baddies into a robot to defend itself, but its graphics were on the level of an Atari 2600.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I like this.
I'm hoping NASA involvement will help produce spinoffs for the domestic user eventually. We're all probably familiar with this happening in the past. Military interest might be nice for research too.
This could address some of the things that bother me about the most common modern architecture paradigms.
Such as when you're performing one type of task the hardware for other types can remain un[der]utilised. Like my graphics card is sitting on it's ass when the cpu is running emulation or ray-tracing. I expect other examples suggest themselves from your own experience.
This specific inefficiency is a subset of the general case that the best way to perform a particular function is to design hardware especially for it.
There are several ways that a reconfigurable parallel machine could be better. And maybe a few ways that they could do things our pcs can't today.
Whether FPGA type technology can be made fast enough and manufactured cheap enough without having to spend as much R&D money as non-reconfigurable chips have taken, I don't know.
where condition can be for example or
really repairing problems or just auto rebooting like the mars rover until the batteries run out?
This is good stuff because a solution of this nature will soon also be required in aircraft and perhaps other terrestrial vehicles.
It's Roland the Plogger again, pushing his ad-laden blog. The actual research summary is here. The real paper won't be out until July.
This isn't new. JPL has been trying various levels of self-healing for years.
The original article describes a cluster of five machines, set up so that if one fails, others take over tasks running on the failed machine. That's what the better server management systems do. I went to a talk last week by Amazon's CTO, and he described how their platform does that.
The project web site makes things clearer. There are two levels of recovery. The upper level works like cluster fallover. The lower level tries to reconfigure the FPGAs to use different cells in the FPGA to work around faults. That's likely to be a delicate process; you'd need substantial on-chip test resources to reliably do gate-level fault isolation on an FPGA that's been hit hard by a cosmic ray. It's not clear how fine-grained this is; this may be more like having multiple units like GPU shaders replicated in an FPGA, with the ability to turn off the failed ones. Sort of like the way Sony ships PS3 machines with eight Cell processors, at least seven of which work.
The available info isn't enough to tell whether this is a good idea or not. About typical for Roland the Plogger.
Aspergers or Tourettes? It's your life mission to make as many -1 comments as possible.
Is there one person that visits slashdot that didn't immediately think of 2001 when reading this?
Getting hazy, can't divide three by two.
My answers I can not see 'em,
they're stuck in my Pentium.
It would be fleet, my answers sweet,
on a workable FPU.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...welcome our new self-healing computer overlords!
I for one welcome our self sustaining indestructible mechanical overlords.
Lamgley,
Paper E3,
Paper 161 and even a 110MB video of students
programming FPGAs at NASA
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
When you take a set of systems and let them vote on which among them have the "most right" answer, that's a committee.
Take two sets, and that's a congress.
Get enough members into these sets and they'll reset each other over and over, accomplishing nothing useful. As a design principle it's brilliant as they'll never figure out that accomplishing nothing was the original goal anyway.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well as long as they don't use nvidia chipsets and/or drivers.
My first thought wasn't one of 2001, rather the old IBM Self healing "magic pixiedust" ad" Can be found here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=3nbEeU2dRBg
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
It definitely feels good to be home, oh wait, you weren't talking to me. Hehe.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
If someone sells HAL terminal PC cases i'd sell my liver for one!
Actually there are a few new things under the sun, with more coming. http://forum.signonsandiego.com/showpost.php?p=3118401&postcount=31
From TFA:
...will hopefully be a worthy [pred|succ]essor to LCARS.
Co-operation beats competition
I immediately had happy thoughts of adaptable ship computers a la Star Trek the Next Generation. They were always re-routing pathways though the systems on the spur of the moment to reach more resources or get past damage. :)
Yes, I am a geek.