Synchronization And Fault Tolerance In A Distributed Tracker
David A. Leighton, Brian K. Hansen · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1989
Aerojet has developed a fault tolerant, distributed tracker under the Advanced Onboard Signal Processor (AOSP) Brassboard Demonstration Program for Rome Air Development Center (RADC). The AOSP Brassboard is a fault tolerant, loosely coupled, distributed network of microprocessors. The tracker function correlates several scans of Representative Return data (the input data comes from a scanning IR sensor.) to form tracks which are analyzed to estimate various parameters for the events being tracked. The distributed nature of the AOSP architecture and the stressing performance requirements of the application necessitated a detailed architectural design phase. The key part of the architectural design was the partitioning, which consisted of finding an acceptable allocation of application functions to processors. It was necessary to partition the tracker into several tasks because its stressing memory and throughput requirements could not be satisfied by a single processor from the AOSP Brassboard. The partitioning process had to take into account the extra processing and memory required by fault tolerance. This paper describes the approach to fault tolerance in the distributed tracker used in the AOSP demonstration program.