NASA Relies on Wind River Simulation Technology for Long-Term Cost Savings

For this reason, Simics has become an important component of NASA's IV&V group's GO-SIM product. 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. Along with Simics’ capabilities of scripting, debugging, inspection and fault injection, it enables users to define, develop and integrate their systems without the constraints of physical target hardware. Simics 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.

It is gratifying to know that 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, said Michel Genard, vice president of tools and lifecycle solutions at Wind River. In addition to minimizing 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.