Towards resilient spaceflight systems with virtualization

Demand for high-performance computing in spaceflight applications is accelerating the development of next-generation processors for space. These processors, including Boeing's High-Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) and Xilinx's Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoCs, offer feature-rich and multi-core ARM Cortex-A53 processors with hardware extensions for efficient execution and isolation of virtualized systems. This capability for virtualization enables new opportunities for enhanced fault tolerance through system-level redundancy of complete flight-software systems. In this paper, we present Virtualized Space Applications (ViSA), a framework leveraging the Xen hypervisor for deploying software-based fault tolerance for flight systems. We evaluate and analyze ViSA's enhancements to reliability and availability of the system in both an experimental lab setting and under neutron radiation-beam testing at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE). As a case study, we investigate software-based replication and voting on the core Flight Executive (cFE) suite of flight software from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) on the ViSA framework.