Date of Award:

5-2009

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair(s)

Aravind Dasu

Committee

Aravind Dasu

Committee

Brandon Eames

Committee

Edmund A. Spencer

Abstract

Increased levels of science objectives expected from spacecraft systems necessitate the ability to carry out fast on-board autonomous mission planning and scheduling. Heterogeneous radiation-hardened Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) with embedded multiplier and memory modules are well suited to support the acceleration of scheduling algorithms. A methodology to design circuits specifically to accelerate Simulated Annealing Kernels (SAKs) in event scheduling algorithms is shown. The main contribution of this thesis is the low complexity scoring calculation used for the heuristic mapping algorithm used to balance resource allocation across a coarse-grained pipelined data-path. The methodology was exercised over various kernels with different cost functions and problem sizes. These test cases were benchedmarked for execution time, resource usage, power, and energy on a Xilinx Virtex 4 LX QR 200 FPGA and a BAE RAD 750 microprocessor.

Checksum

17bb15790c9e560331940e9cdae8076f

Share

COinS