A SIMD Solution to Guarantee Real-Time Requirements for Air Traffic on Associative Processor Architectures

This paper proposes a SIMD solution to air traffic control (ATC) using an enhanced SIMD machine model called an Associative Processor (AP). Automatic Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a goal of FAA’s Next-Gen Project and is rapidly becoming more important. Previous ATC systems designed for MIMD computers have a great deal of difficulty meeting the predictability requirements for ATC, which are critical for meeting the strict certification standards required for safety critical software components. Instead, we implement this dynamic database problem on an enhanced SIMD system called an Associative Processor (AP), where interactions are much simpler and more efficiently controlled. Our proposed AP solution can support fully redundant, fail-safe, accurate and meaningful predictions of worst case execution times of 8 real-time ATC tasks and will guarantee all their deadlines are met. Also, the software will be much simpler and smaller in size than the current corresponding ATC software. An important consequence of these features is that the V&V (Validation and Verification) process will be considerably simpler than for current ATC software. Additionally, the associative processor is enhanced SIMD hardware and is considerably cheaper and simpler than the MIMD hardware currently used to support ATC. The ClearSpeed CSX600 accelerator is used to emulate the AP model, and a preliminary implementation of the proposed method has been developed. Experimental results comparing MIMD and CSX600 approaches are presented, and show that our solution can guarantee that all realtime ATC tasks will finish within their hard deadlines for all aircraft being tracked. The comparative performance of CSX600 demonstrates that AP (and SIMDs in general) has better scalability, efficiency, and predictability than that of MIMD. Keywords-Air Traffic Control (ATC); SIMD; MIMD; Associative Processor (AP); Conflict detection and resolution (CD&R); ClearSpeed CSX600; Validation and Verification(V&V);