Open Call for Innovative Defense-Related Dual-Purpose Technologies/Solutions with a Clear Air Force Stakeholder Need

USAF Missile Systems Center (SMC) has recently started using technologies such as virtual machines, Docker, and cloud computing architectures to “containerize� software applications and components to facilitate easier reuse, decrease development time, and improve security posture. While containerization is an effective strategy for managing and deploying general purpose software applications that are meant to run on commodity server hardware, it does not deal as effectively with software meant to utilize special purpose hardware such as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) or software that requires access to data acquisition and generation devices such as Analog to Digital (A/D) cards and Software Defined Radio (SDR) components. Systems that include these components pose challenges to SMC as they attempt to port from one HW/SW base to another. The intent of this SBIR effort is to address these challenges by defining and prototyping an enterprise approach to interfacing with differing hardware resources from within software containers, which lead to greater consistency across the SMC enterprise and significantly improve development and integration time of future systems. Under this SBIR Cosmic AES will explore architectures to implement hardware abstraction to not only enable software reuse across differing sets of hardware such as Multi Mission SMC/s Processors (MMP)/SDRs.