Shields Up! Software Radiation Protection for Commodity Hardware in Space

Exponentially-declining launch costs have led to an explosion of inexpensive satellites launched to space, often equipped with off-the-shelf chips. These chips, however, lack hardware radiation protection, so space radiation can cause data corruption or even permanent damage. We design shieldsup, a software system that shields commodity hard- ware from space radiation. shieldsup protects against the two most ubiquitous and costly fault scenarios: (a) radiation-induced short-circuits that lead to hardware failure; and (b) particles that cause silent data corruption. shieldsup counters these failure scenarios with two components. First, it uses a short-circuit detector that can detect tiny disturbances in the device’s current draw by estimating the normal current draw when resource utilization is low. Second, it introduces a runtime library which duplicates the execution of spacecraft workloads in a CPU and memory-efficient manner, and catches SDCs even when it affects the CPU’s pipeline or cache. In our experiments, we show shieldsup is very effective at preventing both types of errors, and is 1.4−35.5× more power-efficient than the state-of-the-art protection mechanism in detecting silent data corruption. We are deploying shieldsup in missions in low-earth orbit and in deep space