17 Dec 2012

Wind River claims NASA makes cost savings with its simulation technology

Wind River reveals that that NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) Program is using the company's Simics simulator, for its high-fidelity simulator product, GO-SIM.

NASA’s IV&V Program was founded as part of NASA’s strategy to provide the highest achievable levels of safety and cost-effectiveness for mission-critical software.

“Wind River has enabled the NASA IV&V group to successfully meet its goals to develop a complete simulator in a reduced time frame and at a lower cost than if it had performed traditional hardware simulations,” says Michel Genard, vice president of tools and lifecycle solutions at Wind River.

“In addition to minimising target hardware dependencies by using Simics, 80–90% of the simulation models created can be reused for other missions, representing tremendous long-term cost savings for NASA,” he adds.

GO-SIM’s functions include loading and running unmodified flight software binaries, executing flight scripts, performing single-step debugging, injecting errors via the ground system, stressing the system under test, and validating findings from other analyses.

Simics enables target software to run on a virtual platform the same way it does on physical hardware. It also enables users to define, develop and integrate their systems without the constraints of physical target hardware.

The simulator allowed NASA’s IV&V team to simulate their target hardware, ranging from a single processor to large, complex, and connected electronic systems, and build its GO-SIM product with all the desired features.

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