Experiences with an operational associative processor

Abstract

The MITRE Corporation has implemented a set of space object position prediction equations on the Goodyear Aerospace Corporation STARAN(b) S-1000 associative processor. This paper outlines the experience gained from this task. For information on STARANhardware and software, the reader is directed to Goodyear Aerospace Corporation, STARANDevelopment Division. The SGP4 (Simplified General Perturbation #4) system consists of forty-four equations with fourteen inputs and sixteen outputs, Computation is done in a sequential manner with no branches or conditional computations, NO possible sources of parallelism exist within the equations. To utilize the parallelism of the STARAN, many sets of data are processed simultaneously, These equations are typical of a class of scientific computations involving non-iterative arithmetic operations.