rafal graczyk

My main research focuses on methods for constructing mission-critical and therefore necessarily fault and intrusion tolerant, reliable and resilient computing systems for use in space. In particular, I am interested in what is known as New Space, that is, mechanisms and construction principles that allow us to use highly performant ground-based systems on board of spacecrafts with minimal to no need for radiation hardened, costly, special-purpose solutions. In my RecAV research project (CBK PAN, Astri Polska, Airbus Defense & Space), I researched how mission-critical parts of a system can heal themselves by leveraging the dynamic partial reconfiguration capabilities of modern FPGA devices. I constructed an experimental system setup of reconfigurable avionics to show how the requirements of the Ariane 5 launcher and of observation satellites can be met. Among other things, dynamic reconfiguration enabled the co-location of less critical functionality and the temporal dispatching of this functionality on the same tile, which lead to a significant reduction of the missions overall computational resource demand and thus cost. In BRITE (CBK PAN, University of Toronto, University of Graz, Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center), I designed and contributed to the construction of a constellation of 6 micro-satellites, capable of observing bright star variations (e.g., star quakes). My responsibility was the development, implementation and testing of all on-board computer tasks (housekeeping, attitude control, data processing). I contributed to the ESA flagship mission PROBA-3 (CBK PAN, ESA, Center Spatial de Liege, 4 companies in Poland) with instrument data-processing and power-distribution systems (project size: 2.8 MEUR). As technical and project manager, I was responsible for leading the system development from conception over advanced design to working prototype or a control system, which manages tight formation flying of two satellites observing our sun’s corona. At SnT, I’m responsible for architectural research on hardware and software solutions aiming at ensuring fault-tolerance in space deployed deployed systems (FNR Core project HERA on Hypervisor-Enforced RAdiation tolerance in multi-core SoCs for space) as well as their commercialization - turning ideas into viable business cases (FNR Jump project SHARCS).