When multi-core processors are used in the space industry, they are mostly used in AMP configurations. The cost of increased complexity and difficulty in analyzing SMP systems has been deemed too high in comparison with the benefits of more processing power. A reason for this is the lack of easy to analyze operating systems capable of SMP configurations.
In this paper we present an European Space Agency (ESA) activity aimed at bringing easily accessible SMP support to GR712RC and ESA’s future Next Generation Microprocessor (NGMP). This will be achieved by extending the RTEMS operating system with SMP capabilities and by providing parallel programming models and related libraries to exploit the intrinsic parallelism of space applications. The work will be validated by porting the single-core Gaia Video Processing Unit space application used in ESA’s Gaia satellite project to RTEMS SMP running on GR712RC and NGMP.