Description
Objective: This effort will develop commercially viable re-use of existing DoW assets in lieu of new hardware investments. It will demonstrate achieving mission-capable performance, security, and stability into legacy “low-resource” assets (low-resource: end-of-lifed and/or < 25% of proposed new-system resources – in one-of RAM, CPU, disk). The end product will establish approaches about material reuse regarding the oft-quoted “[y]ou go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time” (Donald Rumsfeld). Description: The warfighter and their sustainment enterprise face the challenge of widely-fielded, well-understood, and battle-tested hardware being pervasive, but the rapidly evolving landscape of processing, sensor fusion, algorithms, and more do not keep pace with those. For example, often the Department looks to long-term program-of-record modernization programs which look at near-“green-field” approaches – such as creating a new flight computer system for a plane, before being able to load it with updated software. In these cases, “green-field” development approaches, incentives to sell new hardware, and difficulty of understanding legacy systems (e.g., vendor attrition, USG not retaining technical data packages) leads to “we have to upgrade it before we can have this new feature”. Likewise, new hardware can typically only be added at multi-year baseline intervals. The challenge is to determine alternate paths. Developments in meta-programming borrowed from the security community allow new functions to be added to existing systems using their existing code through ‘semantic overlays’. This seeks innovative solutions that repurpose existing hardware to add net-new features not thought possible today due to resource limitations (lack-of-upgradeability, RAM, CPU, disk, etc).This approach shifts focus from procuring powerful hardware to creatively applying all available computational resources, no matter how minimal. This is critically not creating new chips, new computing architectures, etc. Instead, this effort seeks to repurpose existing chips and architectures in novel ways to fill capability gap. Keywords: remanufacturing, microprogramming, microcircuits, engineering, green-field,de-manufacturing CMMC Level: Level 2 (Self)