I'm guessing its actually running on a ground station, providing commands or analysing data from satellites, hence why its non-critical and the need has arisen for parallel computation, presumably to speed it up.
Many ARM embedded systems can support C# with the open source .net micro framework (http://www.netmf.com), which doesnt require any OS, and was originally developed for Microsoft's SPOT watch. I haven't used it myself, and I agree with you that it doesn't sound, ideal at first for realtime apps, but none or soft realtime embedded applications are common too.
Yeah it's a ground station application. So it isn't running on any embedded hardware. We'd have done something different for that.
Performance isn't the only thing we are considering. We want to get improved performance, but our old analysis code was extreemly hard to maintain, so that went into the decision as well. Honestly, I'd probably pick another language, but I wasn't on the project when it started.
I personally would have liked to do this with F# because of how functional it is at it's core, but that's cuz we have a lot of Microsoft expertise in house.
Also one thing with the engineering apps is that anything where engineers (not software engieners) don't have to learn a new language is going to be an easier sell.
Many ARM embedded systems can support C# with the open source .net micro framework (http://www.netmf.com), which doesnt require any OS, and was originally developed for Microsoft's SPOT watch. I haven't used it myself, and I agree with you that it doesn't sound, ideal at first for realtime apps, but none or soft realtime embedded applications are common too.