A Trade-Off between Computing Power and Energy Consumption of On-Board Data Processing in GPU Accelerated In-Orbit Space Systems

On-board data processing is one of the prior on-orbit activities that improves the performance capability of in-orbit space systems such as deep-space exploration, earth and atmospheric observation satellites, and CubeSat constellations. However, on-board data processing encounters higher energy consumption compared to traditional on-board space systems. This is because the traditional space systems employ simple processing units such as single-core microprocessors as the systems do not require heavy data processing. Moreover, solving the radiation hardness problem is crucial in space, and adopting a new processing unit is challenging. In this paper, we consider a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated in-orbit space system for on-board data processing. According to prior works, there exist radiation-tolerant GPU, and the computing capability of systems is improved by using heterogeneous computing method. We conduct experimental observations of energy consumption and computing potential using this heterogeneous computing method in our GPU accelerated in-orbit space systems. The results show that the proper use of GPU increases computing potential with 10-140 times and consumes between 8-130 times less energy. Furthermore, the entire task system consumes 10-65% of less energy compared to the traditional use of processing units.