Military researchers set sights on leap-ahead technologies for high-performance embedded computing (HPEC)

FORT BELVOIR, Va., 30 May 2014. U.S. military researchers are attempting major advances in military high-performance embedded computing (HPEC) by focusing on solutions to problems that are too difficult for today's technology as a way to refine the directions of future research.

Officials of the Army Contracting Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., released a request for information (W909MY14QSEAK) earlier this month for the Suite of Embedded Applications and Kernels (SEAK) program, which will identify embedded applications and kernels that represent the most difficult embedded computing challenge of interest to the military.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) Communications-Electronics Research, Development, and Engineering Center (CERDEC) Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD) at Fort Belvoir, Va., the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) in Arlington, Va., are involved in the SEAK HPEC program.

Related: VPX emerging as the industry choice for high-performance embedded computing

SEAK's goal is to produce a suite of embedded computing applications and software kernels that represent the most difficult HPEC challenges to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). These difficult problems are referred to as "critical resource-constrained processing domains of interest."

The program also will try to formulate a process for assessing and evaluating potential solutions to these critical resource-constrained processing domains of interest.

To do this, military researchers are asking industry to identify the processing workloads that even today's most advanced embedded computing technology cannot handle, due to computational, I/O, or bandwidth complexity. Military researchers then would like to distribute these computational workload problems to the research community for potential solutions.

Related: Hypertemporal imaging: the next Big Challenge for high-performance embedded computing

Part of the SEAK program is to rank a set of difficult embedded processing challenges in terms of performance, power, and reliability, researchers say. For this request for information, researchers are asking industry for detailed information on representative HPEC computational workloads relevant to the program.

The DARPA Microsystems Technology Office has overall responsibility for the SEAK project. The the Pacific Northwest National Lab is handling the SEAK technical effort, while the Army RDECOM CERDEC NVESD has an advisory role.

From industry, researchers want information to characterize HPEC workloads such that experts at the Pacific Northwest National Lab can identify key algorithms and kernels and develop sample computational workloads for distribution to the research community.

Related: Prospects for high-performance embedded computing (HPEC) look brighter than ever before

Technical areas of interest center on data flows; sensor and data bandwidths; size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints; communications traffic; tasking; and other workload requirements unique to DOD high-performance embedded computing. The SEAK program will distill these workloads into a publicly releasable format suitable for wide distribution.

Companies interested in participating should email their suggestions no later than 5 Dec. 2014 to the Pacific Northwest National Lab's Adolfy Hoisie at [email protected]; the NVESD's John Hodapp at [email protected]; or DARPA's Joseph Cross at [email protected].

For questions or concerns phone the Army's Michelle Hodges at 703-704-0846. The SEAK program response template is online at http://hpc.pnnl.gov/projects/SEAK.

More information is online at https://www.fbo.gov/notices/d671b14dbe09203a75bdf911c8f6127c.