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The Octavo soft-processor was a doctoral research project aimed at building FPGA overlay architectures by increasing the performance of soft-processors though adapting their architecture to FPGAs instead of ASICs. It works, it's fast, it proved its concepts, but it's too hard to program.

Tries to make a small, powerful, general-purpose CPU for FPGA's by designing it partly on top of DSP cores that most soft cores ignore.

Abstract: "Although FPGAs continue to grow in capacity, FPGA-based soft processors have grown very little becauseof the difficulty of achieving higher performance in exchange for area. Superscalar out-of-order processor microarchitectures have been used successfully for hard processors for many year...

NASA is improving a flight software system to help create and certify essential software for the lunar Gateway. As part of the Artemis program, NASA will send astronauts to the Moon and establish a sustained lunar presence by the end of the decade. The Gateway will provide a waypoint for lunar explo...

Created at NASA’s JPL, the open-source flight software called F Prime isn’t just powering humanity’s first interplanetary helicopter; it’s also powering inspiration at multiple universities. When NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hovered above the Red Planet on April 19 on its maiden voyage, the mome...

Basel researchers challenge Microsoft’s claim of detecting Majorana particles, proposing impurities in nanowires as an alternative explanation. In March 2022, Microsoft announced research findings concerning the manifestation of a unique particle that could potentially be utilized for crafting notab...

NASA awarded its Software of the Year to the team behind LHASA 2.0, a tool providing global insights into rainfall-triggered landslides. Available as open-source, LHASA assists a wide range of stakeholders in disaster readiness and response. NASA has awarded the prestigious NASA Software of the Year...

The MIT spinout Silverthread helps companies transform complex codebases into modular systems that can be changed or updated without headaches. As a software engineer, Dan Sturtevant SM ’08, PhD ’13 had jobs where making a small change to a codebase was easy — and jobs where a similarly small change...

MIT spinout DataCebo helps companies bolster their datasets by creating synthetic data that mimic the real thing. Generative AI is getting plenty of attention for its ability to create text and images. But those media represent only a fraction of the data that proliferate in our society today. Data ...

The software discipline has broad involvement across each of the NASA Mission Directorates. Some recent discipline focus and development areas are highlighted below, along with a look at the Software Technical Discipline Team’s (TDT) approach to evolving discipline best practices toward the future. ...