article · English
Simulation Accelerator
A one-page NASA spinoff article describing EAI Simulation Associates' Advanced Real-Time System (ARTS) simulation accelerator, developed under Goddard Space Flight Center SBIR contracts. The system employs an analog model of computation and a scheduling compiler that maps continuous-system source code directly onto data-flow hardware with fine-grain parallelism, achieving better-than-supercomputer performance. A Space Shuttle main engine benchmark — requiring 40 integrators, several hundred summers and multipliers, 38 dividers, and 32 arbitrary function generators — ran in real time with four processors, more than eight times faster than a supercomputer; five ARTS systems were sold commercially through Halifax Corporation.
digital simulation acceleratorreal-time simulationdata-flow processorNASA SBIR