Authored by John Kelleher, Editor. Excerpt below originally published in Military & Aerospace Electronics.
NEW ORLEANS – The general-purpose graphics processing unit -- GPGPU for short -- represents perhaps the most revolutionary leap in computer processing capability in decades for aerospace and defense applications. Not only does it offer advanced graphics rendering and massively parallel processing, but its capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning also are just being explored.
The GPGPU chip has potentially hundreds of separate processing cores. Originally these were for rendering complex graphics, and later for massively parallel processing. Today they are considered to be artificial intelligence engines; each core can mimic a neuron in the human brain to offer machine learning.
The first benefit of GPGPUs in aerospace and defense applications today was for displays, which are proliferating from the aircraft cockpit to the infantry soldier using wearable computing. Then came parallel processing. "Somebody figured out they were good at single-precision floating point math," says Marc Couture, product manager at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions in Ashburn, Va.
"GPGPUs are getting good at deep learning," says Curtiss-Wright's Couture. "Within defense, deep learning can be used in UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], so instead of humans picking out targets on the grounds, GPGPUs are getting good at doing what humans have done. Deep learning for tactical sensors is faster than a human at picking targets on the ground."
Read the full article here in Military & Aerospace Electronics.