GPU4S

GPU4S (Embedded GPUs for Space) is a research initiative funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) evaluating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) embedded graphics processing units for space payload processing and autonomous navigation.

🎯 Objectives & Scope

Space applications increasingly require high-throughput parallel computing for satellite image processing, SAR, and autonomous navigation. GPU4S investigated the feasibility and reliability of deploying embedded GPUs in harsh radiation space environments.

💡 Key Research Innovations

• Space GPU Benchmark Suite: Developed a standardized open-source benchmark suite representative of space payload processing workloads.
• SafeSoftDR (Software-Based Diverse Redundancy): Created a software-only fault tolerance library providing kernel-level diverse redundancy on GPUs to mitigate soft errors without hardware modification.
• COTS Architecture Evaluation: Evaluated low-power embedded GPU architectures (ARM Mali, NVIDIA Jetson, AMD) for radiation tolerance and performance-per-watt.

🏛️ Key Collaborators

• Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
• European Space Agency (ESA)
• Airbus Defence and Space