Software-Hardware Architecture for Distributed Compute at the Edge

In recent years, commercial companies have begun deploying large constellations of small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The Department of Defense is currently planning proliferated LEO (pLEO) constellations, and NASA is examining the utility of "swarms" of small spacecraft to achieve scientific objectives. Such constellations may need distributed onboard computing to meet requirements for low latency and reliability. A spacecraft constellation can be viewed as a cluster of computer hardware nodes and is therefore a type of edge computing. This paper documents a High-Performance Computing (HPC) Module Architecture to enable edge computing in space. This paper was originally approved for public release as Aerospace Report Number ATR-2022-01979.