Open Standard Middleware Enables New HPEC Solutions

The military embedded computing landscape has been transformed from where it was 20 years ago - and that has been almost entirely enabled by the ability of prime contractors, systems integrators, and OEMs to leverage the products of COTS manufacturers who take leading edge commercial technologies and apply them successfully to the world of military computing. A look at the commercial landscape today reveals cell phones that are putting vast amounts of location-aware information - and the ability to process that information - directly into the hands of consumers. The Internet of Things has become a deployable reality, with data derived from millions of connected sensors.

Some of these technologies have migrated into the military embedded computing world. Just as cell phones exist on the edge of the network, so now, new generations of small, lightweight, low power, incredibly capable devices are being deployed on the leading edge of the battlefield. The technologies used by companies such as Amazon and Google within their HPC (high performance computing) data centers are being made available to the defense market to bring high performance embedded computing (HPEC) to military platforms of all shapes and sizes. Increasingly, more and more sophisticated sensors are being deployed to give strategic and tactical information advantage to warfighters - not to mention their use in maximizing military asset availability and minimizing cost of ownership, and this drives the need for HPEC.