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Essay on Business Benefits Of Computer Upgrades
The Pentagon is adopting signal processing as part of a move toward implementing commercial technologies. The agency's main effort involves integrating digital signal processing chips and modules and operating systems into open architectures, effectively upgrading the performance of processing-intensive systems such as sonars and airborne radars. Although commercial hardware has been successfully integrated into weapon systems, software reliability and development costs do not match industry standards.
The performance upgrade to the UYS-1 advanced signal processor Navy sonar demonstrates the military's interest in integrating commercial hardware and replacing costly military-standard components. The upgrade has resulted in dramatic performance improvement and bypasses proprietary open systems. Slow software development is a key concern as more commercial hardware is adopted. The Pentagon's solution is software reuse within and across programs. Signal processing is emerging as an early recruit in the Pentagon's forced march toward greater use of commercial technologies. (Alster, 2002)
A number of computer upgrades are already under way at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association show. Most revisions attempt to integrate what the military considers open architectures such as VMEbus with commercial DSP chips and modules as well as real-time operating systems. Sonars, airborne radars and other processing-intensive systems are the early candidates for performance upgrades. Despite the successful migration of commercial hardware into weapons systems, however, the military lags far behind industry in terms of software reliability and development costs.
Typical of the effort to replace costly military-standard components with less-expensive, more-powerful commercial electronics is a performance upgrade to a Navy sonar called the UYS-1 advanced signal processor. More than 1,800 identify and track submarines. Prime contractor Loral Federal Systems (Manassas, Va.) enlisted several companies, including CSPI (Billerica, Mass.) and Wind River Systems Inc. (Alameda, Calif.), to supply commercial technology projected to deliver a twenty-fold increase in the acoustic signal processor's performance. (Chin, 2001)....
