The Application of a Distributed Computing Architecture to a Large Telemetry Ground Station

Abstract

The evolution of telemetry ground station systems over the past twenty years has tracked the evolution of the mini-computer industry during that same time period. As the various mini-computer vendors introduced systems offering ever increasing compute power, and ever increasing capabilities to support multiple simultaneous users, the high end of the telemetry ground station systems offered by the industry evolved from single stream, single user, raw data systems to multi-user, multiple stream systems supporting real-time data processing and display functions from a single CPU or, in some cases, a closely coupled set of CPUs. In more recent years we have seen the maturation of networking and clustering concepts within the digital computer industry to a point where such systems coupled with current workstation technology, now permit the development of large telemetry ground station systems which accommodate large numbers of simultaneous users, each with his or her own dedicated computing resources. This paper discusses, at a hardware block diagram and software functional level, the architecture of such a distributed system.