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Satellite Avionics Fault Tolerant Hypervisor

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Contract: W31P4Q-13-C-0143
Agency Tracking Number: D131-009-0086
Amount: $99,924.00
Phase: Phase I
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: SB131-009
Solicitation Number: 2013.1
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2013
Award Year: 2013
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2013-06-06
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2014-03-07
Small Business Information
MN
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2551
United States
DUNS: 165988937
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Todd Carpenter
 Chief Engineer
 (651) 295-7126
 todd.carpenter@adventiumlabs.com
Business Contact
 Kyle Nelson
Title: CEO
Phone: (612) 280-9843
Email: kyle.nelson@adventiumlabs.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

Hypervisors could significantly increase mission utility and life of space platforms, while decreasing acquisition time and cost. Terrestrial hypervisor applications, including cloud computing and avionics for Unmanned Aerial Systems, enjoy the benefits of maintenance, short-duration missions, and vastly lower acquisition and replacement costs. As such, they have limited need and ability to detect and handle run-time faults in the underlying hardware and their data structures. By comparison, long duration space-based missions operate in harsh radiation environments, where maintenance is not an option, yet transient and permanent failures can and do happen. Historically, this has been dealt with by expensive radiation-hardened systems with highly constrained, highly tested runtimes, operating systems, applications, and payloads. Hypervisors could change the space computing paradigm, by enabling reconfigurability and migration of legacy applications to more modern processing platforms. However, without significant attention to the harsh fault environment of space, that utility will be severely limited. Hardware faults from Single Event Effects (SEEs) can cause hypervisors to fail in unintended ways, which can lead to corruption and unacceptable violation of partition boundaries. SAFTHY will detect hypervisor-specific errors due to transient and permanent SEEs in a space-based environment, support autonomous fault management, and provide remote integrity attestation.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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