Posted on 09/03/2004 7:13:37 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
A US FIRM said that it has delivered two single board computers which are candidates for the US Air Force Research Labs' space science mission.
Computers in space are bombarded by particles that can destroy the electronics. But, said Maxwell Technologies, the SCS750 includes component shield technology and system level architecture that indicate an error rate of less than one in 10,000 years.
That's a long time.
The SCS750 uses three Power PC 750FM chips which simultaneously run the same program and check with each other, "voting" on each operation.
If one of the CPUs "disagrees" with the other two, the whole system is re-synchronised.
The firm also makes radiation resistant memory modules, power supply units and other components aimed at the space market. µ
Cool! Maybe they'll use Darwin/BSD UNIX for the base operating system.
I would certainly think they would. :o))
Darwin/BSD UNIX?
OK which one is this one.
Been trying to understand some of these different distros,was just reading about Athena....
And the new microsoft Windows media player 10.....
Which sounds good/maybe
Darwin is the basis for Mac OS X, which runs on the PowerPC architecture. It is mostly open source and has been tried and proven. The core is extremely flexible and stable. By all accounts it is one of the largest distros of UNIX, but most people don't ever look under the hood of Mac OS X to realize that. It is BSD based.
Nope. Much more complicated than that. Darwin is the base operating system, but Apple has several layers that run on top of Darwin, and you'd have to recompile all of those, plus the GUI application. That's what I understand so far.
In order for you to run this on a PC, you should emulate a PowerPC processor, and then try and install on top of that. The good news is I've heard of people doing this.
One of the Russian probes to Mars tried this. They had 3 CPUs, and 2 of them had to vote "yes" in order for any action to be taken. Unfortunately, 2 of them malfunctioned leaving only 1 working CPU, which could not outvote the other 2, so it took no actions at all.
Sorry I can't remembe the name of the probe, this story is related in William Burroughs' "This New Ocean".
--Boris
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