SPECIAL FEATURE
Utilizing low latency, high-performance solutions to increase Battlefield Mobility By John Reardon, COTS Journal
Low latency, high-performance solutions are fielded by One Stop Systems (OSS) using the best commercial technologies available. As the mobility of the military, in an ever-increasingly complex battlefield, emerges the need to bring advanced systems to the Edge is clear. The spectacle of advanced weapons stalling a superior fighting force, as evident in Ukraine, is driving the need to build a cohesive, autonomous, and semi-autonomous strategy for the United States. Moving commercial solutions and hardware to the edge has become imperative. This shift for tactical and combat vehicles is based on a compendium of communications and mixed signals to create an asymmetrical Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution that outstrips the enemy’s ability to react.
The Need David Raun, CEO of OSS, has presented a vision that takes advances from the commercial sector and by addressing environmental concerns, moves them to the edge. These advances in making deterministic solutions for a mobile military are based on providing high-performance, transportable solutions. The challenge of placing the most advanced systems in a forward edge location draws on the company’s long history of rugged and semirugged solutions. Raun understood from the beginning that high performance was the key to addressing the demands of a highly connected battlefield. This has led the company to invest heavily in transporting huge datasets using PCIe. PCIe Gen 5 versus Gen 4 The release of PCIe Gen 5.0, twice the speed of its predecessor at 32GT/Sec, was immediately recognized as a solution that would address the copious amounts of data dealt with on the front line. As corresponding storage and processing solutions begin to come to market such as Intel’s Alder Lake, or Samsung’s storage PM1743, the advantages of this 2x speed increase have had a huge impact on system design. The advantage of being downward compatible with Gen 4 would allow hybrid systems that could employ both Gen 4 and Gen 5, further assisting its deployment to the edge. PCIe offers high throughput as well as a small form factor, with scalable link widths of ×1, ×2, ×4, ×8, and ×16 lanes. PCIe is based upon a point-to-point bus topology between a root complex (system/host) and an endpoint (addin card) that supports full-duplex packet-based communications. The Complexities of Implementing Gen 5 The speed which can be achieved by PCIe Gen 5 is not for the faint of heart as it demands advanced skills to harness in a rugged and reliable solution. With over a decade of being the first to market for production solutions that incorporate PCIe, OSS has released their Gen 5
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COTS Journal | July 2022
Image 1: PCIe Gen 5 versus Gen 4
