Firefly inks deal with Lockheed to launch up to 25 missions

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  7 novembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Bringing Photonic Signaling to Digital Microelectronics

  DARPA program seeks to unleash the performance of modern multi-chip modules by integrating optical signaling at the chip-level OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL 11/1/2018 Parallelism – or the act of several processors simultaneously executing on an application or computation – has been increasingly embraced by the microelectronics industry as a way of sustaining demand for increased system performance. Today, parallel computing architectures have become pervasive across all application domains and system scales – from multicore processing units in consumer devices to high-performance computing in DoD systems. However, the performance gains from parallelism are increasingly constrained not by the computational limits of individual nodes, but rather by the movement of data between them. When residing on modern multi-chip modules (MCMs), these nodes rely on electrical links for short-reach connectivity, but once systems scale to the circuit board level and beyond, the performance of electrical links rapidly degrades, requiring large amounts of energy to move data between integrated circuits. Expanding the use of optical rather than electrical components for data transfer could help significantly reduce energy consumption while increasing data capacity, enabling the advancement of massive parallelism. “Today, microelectronic systems are severely constrained by the high cost of data movement, whether measured in terms of energy, footprint, or latency,” said Dr. Gordon Keeler, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “Efficient photonic signaling offers a path to disruptive system scalability because it eliminates the need to keep data local, and it promises to impact data-intensive applications, including machine learning, large scale emulation, and advanced sensors.” Photonic transceiver modules already enable optical signaling over long distances with high bandwidth and minimal loss using optical fiber. Bottlenecks result, however, when data moves between optical transceivers and advanced integrated circuits in the electrical domain, which significantly limits performance. Integrating photonic solutions into the microelectronics package would remove this limitation and enable new levels of parallel computing. A new DARPA program, the Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, seeks to enable future system scalability by developing high-bandwidth optical signaling technologies for digital microelectronics. Working across three technical areas, PIPES aims to develop and embed integrated optical transceiver capabilities into cutting-edge MCMs and create advanced optical packaging and switching technologies to address the data movement demands of highly parallel systems. The efficient, high-bandwidth, package-level photonic signaling developed through PIPES will be important to a number of emerging applications for both the commercial and defense sectors. The first technical area of the PIPES program is focused on the development of high-performance optical input/output (I/O) technologies packaged with advanced integrated circuits (ICs), including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Beyond technology development, the program seeks to facilitate a domestic ecosystem to support wider deployment of resulting technologies and broaden their impact. Projections of historic scaling trends predict the need for enormous improvements in bandwidth density and energy consumption to accommodate future microelectronics I/O. To help address this challenge, the second technical area will investigate novel component technologies and advanced link concepts for disruptive approaches to highly scalable, in-package optical I/O for unprecedented throughput. The successful development of package-level photonic I/O from PIPES' first two technical areas will create new challenges for systems architects. The development of massively interconnected networks with distributed parallelism will create hundreds to thousands of nodes that will be exceedingly difficult to manage. To help address this complexity, the third technical area of the PIPES program will focus on the creation of low-loss optical packaging approaches to enable high channel density and port counts, as well as reconfigurable, low-power optical switching technologies. A full description of the program is available in the Broad Agency Announcement. For more information, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/HR001119S0004/listing.html https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-11-01

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  10 juillet 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint war-fighting operations

  Nathan Strout The Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub is shifting its focus to enabling joint war-fighting operations, developing artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of Defense's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts. “As we have matured, we are now devoting special focus on our joint war-fighting operation and its mission initiative, which is focused on the priorities of the National Defense Strategy and its goal of preserving America's military and technological advantages over our strategic competitors,” Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters July 8. “The AI capabilities JAIC is developing as part of the joint war-fighting operations mission initiative will use mature AI technology to create a decisive advantage for the American war fighter.” That marks a significant change from where JAIC stood more than a year ago, when the organization was still being stood up with a focus on using AI for efforts like predictive maintenance. That transformation appears to be driven by the DoD's focus on developing JADC2, a system of systems approach that will connect sensors to shooters in near-real time. “JADC2 is not a single product. It is a collection of platforms that get stitched together — woven together ― into effectively a platform. And JAIC is spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI component on top of JADC2,” said the acting director. According to Mulchandani, the fiscal 2020 spending on the joint war-fighting operations initiative is greater than JAIC spending on all other mission initiatives combined. In May, the organization awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a five-year, $800 million task order to support the joint war-fighting operations initiative. As Mulchandani acknowledged to reporters, that task order exceeds JAIC's budget for the next few years and it will not be spending all of that money. One example of the organization's joint war-fighting work is the fire support cognitive system, an effort JAIC was pursuing in partnership with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the U.S. Army's Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical. That system, Mulchandani said, will manage and triage all incoming communications in support of JADC2. Mulchandani added that JAIC was about to begin testing its new flagship joint war-fighting project, which he did not identify by name. “We do have a project going on under joint war fighting which we are going to be actually go into testing,” he said. “They are very tactical edge AI is the way I'd describe it. That work is going to be tested. It's actually promising work — we're very excited about it.” “As I talked about the pivot from predictive maintenance and others to joint war fighting, that is probably the flagship project that we're sort of thinking about and talking about that will go out there,” he added. While left unnamed, the acting director assured reporters that the project would involve human operators and full human control. “We believe that the current crop of AI systems today [...] are going to be cognitive assistance,” he said. “Those types of information overload cleanup are the types of products that we're actually going to be investing in.” “Cognitive assistance, JADC2, command and control—these are all pieces,” he added. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/07/08/pentagon-ai-center-shifts-focus-to-joint-warfighting-operations/

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  4 mai 2023 | International, Terrestre

  Poland to open HIMARS service centre in 2023

  Poland will establish a service centre for HIMARS rocket launchers in 2023 and is negotiating the details of an order for 500 more launchers, the Polish defence minister said on Thursday.