Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)

                        Accelerated Science Data Processing


                   Tom Flatley, Semion Kizhner, Phyllis Hestnes,
                             Dave Petrick, and Kate Fox

                          NASA Goddard Space Flight Center


The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) system is the primary
element of U.S. weather monitoring and forecast operations.  Real-time use of GOES
weather data is currently limited by the image processing software execution time.
The acceleration of GOES weather data processing functions would enable or improve
weather forecast and assessment in cases of hurricanes, flooding, tornados, forest
fires, etc.  Our goal is to develop a low cost, PC based system that accelerates 
the processing of GOES weather data by a factor of 10x.  A hybrid system, using 
hardware in the form of reconfigurable computing engines (FPGA’s) and digital signal
processors (DSP’s) to augment traditional CPU functions, is being developed to speed
up the data processing of critical compute-bound algorithmic elements and deliver
true "real-time" performance.