Self-Healing Computers For NASA Spacecraft

Posted by Soulskill on Friday April 25, 2008 @09:07PM from the it-worked-for-the-borg dept.

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.'"

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Not new by Anonymous Coward · 2008-04-25 21:45 · Score: 5, Informative

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."