Arthur C. Clarke famously made the observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the radar and signal intelligence world, corps of Ph.Ds are regularly developing mathematically complex algorithms that require significantly more processing power than can be deployed in a contemporary embedded COTS system. These algorithms must sit gathering dust in a drawer until Moore’s Law has driven performance densities sufficiently to enable the needed compute power for that class of algorithm. When any given class of applications is made possible, more demanding algorithms follow in their wake. This way of understanding our market highlights the fact that there are two types of applications that embedded military and aerospace system designers typically confront.

Welcome to the HPEC Vanguard blog. In this blog we will we endeavor to keep you informed about developments in technology, markets, industry standards and trends related to the adoption and use of commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) technology in the rugged embedded military market.

MIAMI. Often a rad-hard supplier this week at the Nuclear Space Radiation Effects Conference (NSREC) in Miami would tell me his product is available off-the-shelf, but cringed at the notion that it would ever be considered COTS or commercial-off-the-shelf.

Earlier this year, Wind River announced its support of the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) technical standard, which hopes to resolve two fundamental problems with military procurements.

The debate over Small Form Factor (SFF) design standards is escalating but also becoming entertaining with different views coming from both sides of the Atlantic on how to create SFF designs. Demand for these designs in military C4ISR systems is increasing, but system integrators don?t want to get locked into proprietary solutions. So, embedded computing companies are looking at how they can satisfy this demand as well as the need for lower Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP).

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. For nearly three decades, we have witnessed the evolution of the open systems COTS market as it has grown and changed. I look at that time in three phases of maturity: convergence, specialization, and more recently divergence. We need to credit the VMEbus and all those who labored over it with providing a model that demonstrated that there could be a common architecture that allowed interoperability across multiple vendors.