Kouichi Ono

Highly-Dependable Computing for Orbital Data Centers: An MPSoC FPGA-Centric Approach

Abstract

The era of orbital data centers is now within sight. Driven by the rapid growth in the number of satellites enabled by falling launch costs, and by the surging data volumes generated by increasingly capable onboard sensors and communication equipment, the demand for processing data in orbit — for in-space AI workloads, Earth-observation analytics, and other mission-critical applications — is rising rapidly. Realizing such infrastructure, however, requires a fundamental rethinking of computing system design: spaceborne platforms must operate under harsh radiation, severe thermal swings, and tight power budgets, while still sustaining the dependability that mission-critical workloads demand.
This keynote presents our research and development of highly-dependable computing for orbital data centers — a six-year program selected for the JAXA Space Strategic Fund, with a total budget of JPY 13.5 billion (approximately USD 85 million) — centered on the heterogeneous MPSoC FPGA as the core building block. On the Programmable Logic (PL) side, we design and implement hardened circuits that detect and contain faults induced by high-energy space radiation. These PL-side mechanisms cooperate closely with host software — an operating system, middleware, and application stack running outside the FPGA fabric — to carry out Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR), classifying transient and permanent faults, isolating affected resources, and resuming operation without disrupting workload-level service continuity. This hardware/software co-design delivers high dependability while preserving the flexibility, performance density, and reconfigurability that distinguish MPSoC FPGAs from traditional rad-hard ASICs.
Beyond fault tolerance, the MPSoC platform also serves as the control point for power and thermal management tailored to the space environment. By orchestrating voltage/frequency scaling, workload placement, and thermal-aware scheduling jointly between the reconfigurable PL fabric and the host software, the system achieves the low power consumption and low heat dissipation required for sustained operation under vacuum-thermal conditions. The talk will share the underlying design principles, overview of ongoing development projects, and an outlook on how MPSoC FPGAs can become the architectural foundation for the next generation of dependable in-orbit computing infrastructure.

Biography

Mr. Ono was a Research Associate at the Information Science Research and Education Center, Waseda University, From 1990 to 1992, and completed the doctoral course requirements in Electrical Engineering (Computer Engineering) at the Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, in 1994; dissertation not completed. He served as a Board Member of the Japan Society for Software Science and Technology (2003–2006), and as an Adjunct Lecturer at Waseda University (2003–2007) and at Kyushu University (2009). From 2010 to 2012, he also served as a member of the Embedded Systems Working Group at the Software Engineering Center of the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA), an independent administrative agency affiliated with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, where he co-authored the Embedded Software Design Reference (ESDR).

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