> repurposes the high-speed commercial processor inside the Ingenuity Helicopter Base Station ... This radiation can induce “transient bit flips” in memory the software needs to function, and the team developed an effective software-based approach to radiation hardening
Anyone know what they're doing?
It sounds like a single processor, so no best-of-three or similar systems. Software solution only, possibly running on the same bitflipping CPU that's being checked. I'd be very interested to know how it's solved.
This is interesting and I googled a bunch of this.
The helicopter base station is an off the shelf snapdragon 801 cpu with 4 cores. By comparision the CPU in the rover is a BAE RAD750 processor at 200hz, essentially a radiation hardened 1998 G3 imac chip. They run calculations on each snapdragon core and if there is a consensus take the value. I don't know how their voting system works. If core 1 and 2 agree and 3 and 4 don't, does it just agree with core 1 and 2's consensus if 3 and 4 don't match? Or does it was 3 minimum and re-runs the calculation.
It also performs aggressive memory scrubbing. This sounds like software ECC by performing various memory checksums by comparing values to the flash drive's files. So if script.sh on disk doesn't match script.sh in memory, they know the memory is bad. I guess they are assuming flash will always be correct, which is interesting, but in space maybe its just a 'pick a lesser evil' thing because flash can also be corrupted by radiation. They store critical files with triple redundancy on the flash, so the flash sounds pretty rugged here. There is also a secondary radiation hardened flash storage 'golden image' the unprotected snapdragon's running flash can be compared to.
Then the software identifies damaged memory addresses and blocks them. One example is the software found 25 corrupted bits in its 1gb memory and has marked them as unusable. I'm guessing over time more and more bits will be unusable as radiation permanently destroys those transistors. So its a bit of a race against the clock. Better to use the base station until it can't be used anymore.
> repurposes the high-speed commercial processor inside the Ingenuity Helicopter Base Station ... This radiation can induce “transient bit flips” in memory the software needs to function, and the team developed an effective software-based approach to radiation hardening
Anyone know what they're doing?
It sounds like a single processor, so no best-of-three or similar systems. Software solution only, possibly running on the same bitflipping CPU that's being checked. I'd be very interested to know how it's solved.
This is interesting and I googled a bunch of this.
The helicopter base station is an off the shelf snapdragon 801 cpu with 4 cores. By comparision the CPU in the rover is a BAE RAD750 processor at 200hz, essentially a radiation hardened 1998 G3 imac chip. They run calculations on each snapdragon core and if there is a consensus take the value. I don't know how their voting system works. If core 1 and 2 agree and 3 and 4 don't, does it just agree with core 1 and 2's consensus if 3 and 4 don't match? Or does it was 3 minimum and re-runs the calculation.
It also performs aggressive memory scrubbing. This sounds like software ECC by performing various memory checksums by comparing values to the flash drive's files. So if script.sh on disk doesn't match script.sh in memory, they know the memory is bad. I guess they are assuming flash will always be correct, which is interesting, but in space maybe its just a 'pick a lesser evil' thing because flash can also be corrupted by radiation. They store critical files with triple redundancy on the flash, so the flash sounds pretty rugged here. There is also a secondary radiation hardened flash storage 'golden image' the unprotected snapdragon's running flash can be compared to.
Then the software identifies damaged memory addresses and blocks them. One example is the software found 25 corrupted bits in its 1gb memory and has marked them as unusable. I'm guessing over time more and more bits will be unusable as radiation permanently destroys those transistors. So its a bit of a race against the clock. Better to use the base station until it can't be used anymore.