Shipboard electronics designers at Global Technical Systems (GTS) in Virginia Beach, Va., will provide the U.S. Navy with additional rugged air- and water-cooled open-architecture shipboard computers under terms of an $8.5 million order.
Officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington are asking GTS to build 15 Common Processing System (CPS) technical instruction-12 hybrid (TI-12H) water-cooled computers for the Navy Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) and two CPS TI-12H air-cooled computers for ship self-defense systems. The CPS is a rugged shipboard computer processing system based on an open-architecture design.
The CPS provides a common computing infrastructure for ship combat systems, including processing and memory, data storage and extraction, and I/O interfaces for shipboard combat systems. The GTS team building the open-architecture CPS consists of Northrop Grumman, DRS Technologies, IBM, and Oracle Corp.
GTS engineers build the CPS using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software such as BladeCenter technology that supplies common infrastructure for processing and network fabric. Plug-in components are accessible, hot-swappable, and battle-ready protected by the GTS Advanced COTS Enclosure (ACE).
The CPS consists of a rugged enclosure and three subsystems: the processing subsystem, the storage and extraction subsystem, and the I/O subsystem.
The storage and extraction subsystem provides data storage for CPS operating system (OS) image storage, program storage, data extraction, and database management. The I/O subsystem, meanwhile, interfaces the processing and storage hardware to various external elements.
Oracle provides for the Common Processing System open-standard middleware, designated SAFfire, for the CPS to support high-availability management of mission-critical combat system. SAF stands for Standards Availability Forum, an industry consortium of companies that develop open standards-based products. The new-generation Open-SAFfire middleware uses open-source technology based on SAF standards.
The overall CPS is designed with a shock-isolating enclosure that protects unhardened COTS components from the intense shock and vibration that can occur on Navy surface ships.
On this order GTS will do the work in Virginia Beach, Va., and should be finished by this October. For more information contact Global Technical Systems online at http://gts.us.com, or Naval Sea Systems Command at www.navsea.navy.mil.
