This paper presents the design of a many-core computer architecture with fault detection and recovery using partial reconfiguration of an FPGA. The FPGA fabric is partitioned into tiles which contain homogenous soft processors. At any given time, three processors are configured in triple modulo redundancy to detect faults. Spare processors are brought online to replace faulted tiles in real time. A recovery procedure involving partial reconfiguration is used to repair faulted tiles. This type of approach has the advantage of recovering from faults in both the circuit fabric and the configuration RAM of an FPGA in addition to spatially avoiding permanently damaged regions of the chip. 1 2

Global ecosystem observations are important for Earth-system studies. The National Research Council's report entitled Earth Science and Applications from Space is currently guiding NASA's Earth science missions. It calls for a global land and coastal area mapping mission. The mission, scheduled to launch in the 2013-2016 timeframe, includes a hyperspectral imager and a multi-spectral thermal-infrared sensor. These instruments will enable scientists to characterize global species composition and monitor the response of ecosystems to disturbance events such as drought, flooding, and volcanic events. Due to the nature and resolution of the sensors, these two instruments produce approximately 645 GB of raw data each day, thus pushing the limits of conventional data handling and telecommunications capabilities. The implications of and solutions to the challenge of high downlink data volume were examined. Low risk and high science return were key design values. The advantages of onboard processing and advanced telecommunications methods were evaluated. This paper will present an end-to-end data handling system design that will handle the large data downlink volumes that are becoming increasingly prevalent as the 978-1-4244-2622-5/09/$25.00 c 2009 IEEE. IEEEAC Paper #1375, Version 4 Updated 1/09/2009.