Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Looking At the Hardware and Software of JAXA's Hayabusa-2 (imgtec.com)

Submitted by alexvoica
alexvoica writes: After interviewing the NASA New Horizons team (if you've missed the original story on Slashdot, you can find it here), it's time to get the views of another famous space agency (JAXA) on spacecraft hardware and software.
This interview focuses mainly on Hayabusa-2, the world's first round-trip mission to a C-type asteroid. The main goal of the Hayabusa-2 mission is to visit the near-Earth asteroid 1999 JU3, conduct on site science experiments, collect soil samples from the asteroid, and return them back to Earth. 1999 JU3 is a near-Earth C-type asteroid, and is believed to contain organic and hydrated minerals.
The contact at JAXA replying to these questions is Associate Professor Yuichi Tsuda, Ph.D the project manager for Hayabusa-2. Dr. Tsuda works for the Department of Space Flight Systems at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) and at JAXA.

Submission + - Inside NASA's New Horizons: looking at the hardware and software of spacecraft (imgtec.com)

Submitted by alexvoica
alexvoica writes: Last week we learnt that Pluto has blue skies and ice water thanks to a series of high-resolution images provided by the New Horizons probe. But how is the probe taking these photographs and sending them back to NASA? What hardware and software systems are inside and who built them? Luckily, the New Horizons engineering team kindly answered these questions (and many others) in a detailed interview.

Here are some fun facts from my discussion with the engineers:

        The chipset: It might sound strange to some but NASA used to be a chip maker. Before using standard MIPS or Intel CPUs for probes like New Horizons, NASA had to design custom-built processors since the commercial solutions available at the time were not designed to handle the intense workloads of space travel. Inside New Horizons we find a radiation-hardened, MIPS-based Mongoose-V processor worth $40,000 apiece and built using a grant from the Goddard Space Flight Center.
        The camera: New Horizons has a multispectral 1 megapixel camera; sending a single 1200 x 900 image back to earth takes approximately 3-4 hours.
        The comms: Forget 4G LTE, New Horizons uses the very best! The probe relies on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to make its long-distance calls. DSN is the largest and most sensitive scientific telecom system in the world and was also used to guide the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission back to earth. Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon remain forever grateful.
        The memory: New Horizons includes 16GB of flash memory which provides plenty of storage space for photos and other scientific data.
        The operating system: New Horizons runs on Nucleus, a popular operating system designed by Mentor Graphics. Coincidentally, Nucleus is also at the heart of the ARTIK 1 platform for IoT launched by Samsung only a few months ago.

Submission + - MIAOW open source GPU debuts at Hot Chips (eetimes.com)

Submitted by alexvoica
alexvoica writes: The first general-purpose graphics processor (GPGPU) now available as open-source RTL was unveiled at the Hot Chips event. Although the GPGPU is in an early and relatively crude stage, it is another piece of an emerging open-source hardware platform, said Karu Sankaralingam, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Sankaralingam led the team that designed the Many-core Integrated Accelerator of Wisconsin (MIAOW). A 12-person team developed the MIAOW core in 36 months. Their goal was simply to create a functional GPGPU without setting any specific area, frequency, power or performance goals. The resulting GPGPU uses just 95 instructions and 32 compute units in its current design. It only supports single-precision operations. Students are now adding a graphics pipeline to the design, a job expected to take about six months.

Comment Re:Stick a fork in MIPS (Score 1) 28

by alexvoica (#50021325) Attached to: First Fedora Image For the MIPS Available For Testing
There are multiple SBCs you can buy that use MIPS; chipKITs using PIC32 MCUs from Microchip are one example but there are also tons of boards using Qualcomm Atheros or MediaTek Ralink silicon that run OpenWrt. A quick search on Linux Gizmos reveals at least half a dozen MIPS-based boards were launched just in the last year.

Comment Re:Linux everywhere. (Score 1) 28

by alexvoica (#50021309) Attached to: First Fedora Image For the MIPS Available For Testing
We are not aiming for PCs and servers at the moment, our target markets are mobile and embedded devices (phones, tablets, wearables, IoT, networking, home entertainment, automotive, etc.). In that space, MIPS has an advantage and quite an important ecosystem built over the last decades. And MIPS shipments are growing; for example, this year we saw a 9% increase over the previous one.

Comment Re:Linux everywhere. (Score 1) 28

by alexvoica (#50021277) Attached to: First Fedora Image For the MIPS Available For Testing
There are a few publicly announced SoCs using MIPS Warrior CPUs: Baikal-T1 (networking), Altair FourGee-1150/1160 (4G modems) and Mobileye EyeQ4 (ADAS). More recent Cavium OCTEON III and Broadcom XLP II SoCs are also based on the same Release 5 architecture used to build the Warrior family. Regarding Creator, Ci20 was the first board we built using the silicon we had available at the time. But we plan to expand it to include more feature-rich members.

Comment Re:Linux everywhere. (Score 5, Informative) 28

by alexvoica (#50019081) Attached to: First Fedora Image For the MIPS Available For Testing
Great question (I get asked about this a lot). Here are a few points:

(1) Hardware multi-threading support: MIPS offers SMT support for the latest Warrior CPUs; for a slight increase in area (~10%), you can scale up the number of hardware threads (1, 2, 4) and get a 40-50% boost in performance. ARM CPUs do not support SMT and can only scale in number of cores.
(2) Better hardware virtualization support: MIPS Warrior CPUs support hardware virtualization at the low end (e.g. microcontrollers) as well as the high end (application processors). ARM CPUs support hardware virtualization only at the high end. Moreover, MIPS CPUs support multiple trusted execution environments (up to 7 in MCUs, up to 31 at the high end) while ARM CPUs have only one TEE.
(3) Better raw DSP performance: MIPS Warrior CPUs offer superior DSP performance vs. equivalent ARM CPUs (e.g. up to 2.5x better DSP performance in MCUs)
(4) Better performance efficiency: MIPS CPUs offer equivalent performance but at smaller area/power consumption over equivalent ARM cores (e.g. up to 30% area savings at the cluster level and 40% savings at the core level relative to similar performance competition)
(5) More mature 64-bit ecosystem in networking and embedded: MIPS 64-bit CPUs have a rich history in high-performance enterprise networking (examples include Broadcom XLP and Cavium OCTEON processors); there is a whole ecosystem formed around OpenWrt on MIPS for example.

Slashdot Top Deals

Promising costs nothing, it's the delivering that kills you.

Close