Kenneth E. Prager

A fault tolerant signal processing computer

A fault tolerant computer has been designed for radiation environments which employs COTS components. The use of radiation-tolerant but not fully hardened COTS devices provides significantly higher performance than specialty, fully hardened parts. The computer architecture consists of multiple, redundant processing nodes, each containing levels of internal redundancy, and multiple point-to-point communication ports on a crossbar switch. The nodes are linked together via ports to form a distributed crossbar network with inherent fault tolerance. A key attribute of the architecture is the provision for selectable levels of error detection and recovery. The trade-offs between performance and degree of fault tolerance can be dynamically adjusted to meet specific system needs and parts selection at any particular time.