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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."
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.
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
Interestingly, that's pretty much how the Space Shuttle's on-board systems work. Three separate processors from two different vendors (IBM and Rockwell, if I recall correctly.) Nothing new under the Sun, I suppose.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
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
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.
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.