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.
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