1 Software-Based Fault Tolerance for the Maestro Many-Core Processor

Abstract—The current generation of radiation-hardened general-purpose processors, such as the RAD750, lag far behind their commercial counterparts in terms of perfor-mance. To combat this, a new many-core processor was designed that would allow space applications to leverage up to 49 general-purpose processing cores for high perfor-mance space applications. The Maestro processor, based on Tilera’s TILE64 chip, is the result of this effort. Maestro is rad-hard by design, but there is still the possibility of both hardware and software errors. In this paper we describe fault tolerance strategies for today’s multi-core processors with a focus on the Maestro many-core space processor. Processors such as Maestro represent an attractive target for software-based fault tolerance research as the multiple cores, memor