A High-Performance Mezzanine Card for Missile Defense Applications

Rydal Research proposes to research and demonstrate the feasibility of developing a high-performance modular mezzanine card that meets the stringent requirements of the missile environment. The card will be based on the RapidIO network protocol and willprovide throughput in the 4-8 Gb/s range with latencies comparable to local memory access. The card will also be flexible in terms of future processor and memory upgrades. Feasibility will be demonstrated using advanced design, modeling, and simulationtechniques as well as component test and evaluation of key elements of the system. The goal of the Phase I effort is to insure a low-risk insertion of the technology into the next generation of missile defense systems. The development and demonstration ofthis system will benefit missile defense in two ways. First, it will provide an order of magnitude improvement in network throughput and latency. This level of improvement may make possible near-linear parallel speedup in applications with increasinglyfine-grain characteristics while substantially reducing cost, size, and weight. Second, by providing a low-cost means to implement high-performance parallel processing machines, this development will spur the growth of COTS components supporting thesesystems as well as research into operating systems, architectures, and algorithms based on them, further improving the performance and reducing the cost of future missile systems.