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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

High-performance computing for airborne applications

Conference ·
OSTI ID:1022058
Recently, there has been attempts to move common satellite tasks to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs are significantly cheaper to buy than satellites and easier to deploy on an as-needed basis. The more benign radiation environment also allows for an aggressive adoption of state-of-the-art commercial computational devices, which increases the amount of data that can be collected. There are a number of commercial computing devices currently available that are well-suited to high-performance computing. These devices range from specialized computational devices, such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and digital signal processors (DSPs), to traditional computing platforms, such as microprocessors. Even though the radiation environment is relatively benign, these devices could be susceptible to single-event effects. In this paper, we will present radiation data for high-performance computing devices in a accelerated neutron environment. These devices include a multi-core digital signal processor, two field-programmable gate arrays, and a microprocessor. From these results, we found that all of these devices are suitable for many airplane environments without reliability problems.
Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
Sponsoring Organization:
DOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1022058
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-10-04441; LA-UR-10-4441
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English