Published in Military & Aerospace Electronics
Written by John Keller
Rugged computers are the key to bringing advanced capabilities like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and quantum sensing to military ships, aircraft, and land vehicles designed to operate at the edge of the battlefield.
A host of enabling technologies are coming to bear on rugged computers, such as ARM microprocessors, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs), and fast Ethernet networking. Nevertheless, the military computing industry has many design challenges to meet in size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP), thermal management and cooling, and tradeoffs between capability and operating environments before the best technologies can be unleashed.
As the military rugged computing industry moves forward, the most important technology trends, influential aerospace and defense applications, open-systems industry standards, and different approaches to meeting design needs will converge to move the industry forward.
Aerospace and defense applications
Talk to experts in military rugged computing, and inevitably what comes up is a discussion of artificial intelligence, and the computing resources necessary to carry out AI -- particularly on the edge of the battlefield.
"More than ever over the last five to ten years, we are seeing a bigger demand for edge processing -- the need for data processing at the edge, and the use of AI," says Dominic Perez, chief technology officer at the Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense Solutions segment in Ashburn, Va. "As powerful a tool as AI is, it is extremely resource-intensive."
Published in Military & Aerospace Electronics
