Heterogeneous On-Orbit Processing Engine (HOPE) Architecture Design for Edge Processing in Space

An updated system architecture design is presented for a hardware processing unit to integrate and supervise commercial processor boards and evaluate for on-orbit performance. The motivation for such an architecture stems from growing on-orbit processing requirements resulting from increasingly sophisticated sensor technologies with growing data output sizes coupled with needs for faster reaction times and new artificial intelligence algorithms to enable real-time decision making and autonomous spacecraft operations. Where current state-of-the-art radiation-hardened processors cannot provide the levels of computational performance required, commercial processors, particularly lower-SWaP “edge” processors and AI accelerators, can potentially satisfy these requirements but were not designed to survive launch vibration or operate through harsh thermal cycles and radiation environments experienced in space. To address these challenges, the Heterogeneous On-Orbit Processing Engine (HOPE) architecture design has been updated and includes a highly-reliable radiation-hardened computing resource that supervises a diverse collection of commercial processors such as multi-core general purpose processors, field-programmable gate arrays, and graphics-processing units, where each constituent architecture can be called upon to support the applications for which it is best suited. This supervisor can continuously monitor, control, and analyze commercial processor boards to determine the extent to which these terrestrial technologies can survive in the harsh radiation environment of space. Successful development of HOPE and the subsequent spaceflight data will enable future space system concepts to reliably perform on-orbit processing with state-of-the-art commercial technology.