  Following the trend of other safety-critical industries like automotive and
avionics, the space domain is witnessing an increase in the on-board computing
performance demands. This raise in performance needs comes from both control
and payload parts of the spacecraft and calls for advanced electronics systems
able to provide high computational power under the constraints of the harsh
space environment. On the non-technical side, for strategic reasons it is
mandatory to get European independence on the used computing technology. In
this project, we study the applicability of embedded GPUs in space, which have
shown a dramatic improvement of their performance per-watt ratio coming from
their proliferation in consumer markets based on competitive European
technology. To that end, we perform an analysis of the existing space
application domains to identify which software domains can benefit from their
use. Moreover, we survey the embedded GPU domain in order to assess whether
embedded GPUs can provide the required computational power and identify the
challenges which need to be addressed for their adoption in space. In this
paper, we describe the steps followed in the project, as well as a summary of
results obtained from our analyses so far in the project.
