Abstract:

As man explore into deeper space, the need for onboard supercomputers becomes urgent. High performance onboard supercomputer becomes a key issue in th e next-generatlon space explorations. Radiation-hardened components are not only expensive, but also lag several generations in performance behind COTS components in the market of supercomputing technologies. Onboard supercomputers built on COTS components, hardened with software fault tolerance technol ogies, can have an equal fault tolerance ability of their radiation hardened counterparts, but at a much lower cost, with a much higher performance and  higher performance/power ratio. Experiments in NASA and Stanford University have proved that, software fault tolerance on COTS components can help imple  ment low-cost and efficient next-generation space explorations.

Key words: （COTS, onboard supercomputer, software fault tolerance, low-cost, efficient, reliability）