Novel Approaches to Creating Fault Tolerant, Scalable, Heterogeneous Computing Systems for Defense Appli. Form components Not Necessarily...

US military weapons and C4I systems are heavily dependent on digital computer technology. Operational success demands very high performance and reliability. Mission failures, aborts and delays are extremely expensive and can result in casualties. Inevitably, technology faults are caused by bad quality, design flaws and/or a hostile environment created due to an act of war or nature. As a result, military aircraft, ships, submarines, and other critical applications are prone to mission downtime and support needed to keep these critical systems up and running is an unnecessary drain on an already shrinking military budget. There is an urgent need for an effective yet affordable solution, to reduce the cost of the increase in failures due to the fast growing complexity and use of digital technology. Shawn Systems is currently performing ongoing SBIR work on an innovative solution, that will yield digital computers capable of offering orders-of-magnitude higher performance and reliability than what is to cluster upto "n" digital computing nodes to provide distributed processing, automatic load balancing and auto-configuring fault tolerance. In other words, zero performance degradation or loss of data due to selecting "application specific" configurations that are capable of handling the predicted mission performance requirements and expected hardware/software failures. Also, these clustered nodes provide multiple Input/Output paths to allow redundancy to be extended throughout the application --- making the entire application more robust.