Skip to main content

8. Military

Edge use cases​

  • Battlefield awareness
  • Anticipated bottlenecks
  • Mission evaluations
  • UGVs, UAVs and UUVs
  • Supply chain liabilities
  • Medical emergencies
  • Behavior projections
  • Autonomous vehicles
  • Surveillance cameras
  • Sensors & RFID trackers
  • Flight simulations
  • Remote training
  • Fleet management
  • Target detection
  • Weather forecasts
  • Mitigation methods
  • Health surveillance
  • VR devices
  • Machine learning

Introduction​

"...architectures that enable everything to connect to everything else. This is why we can run any application on any device on any network, and why we can freely change them at any time without any concern... The central idea of this digital revolution, which has enabled the Internet of Things, is that individual platforms matter less than the broader network that they are a part of."

-- Christian Brose, The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, 2020.

The battlespace is edge computing. We say battlespace instead of battlefield to force ourselve to think in more than two dimensions.

Edgecell solves three critical challenges facing the modern military:

  1. Compute power portability
  2. Rapid software evolution
  3. Drone warfare

Compute portability​

Military missions demand rapid deployment of compute power into tactical operating centers anywhere on the globe. It is impractical to pack rackmounted servers and the required airconditioning into cargo planes. It is also impractical to require experts in installing and configuring data centers to be deployed into combat zone.

This is what compute portability looks like.

What you see in this simple photograph is a game changer. It is 72 edge servers operating as a single cluster. It has a combined compute power of 432 CPU cores, 36 TB storage and 18,432 GPU cores.

The whole cluster, all 72 servers, is plugged into a standard 20 amp wall socket. The whole cluster is interconnected with a single 16 port network switch that costs about $100. The whole cluster sits safely on a shelf that costs about $40. There is no uninterrupted power supply, because each server has a built-in one hour battery. There is no special air conditioning because the whole cluster is less than 1000 watts.

Rapid software evolution​

Miltary software lifecycles need to catch up with the 21st Century. Multi-year waterfall development processes will utterly fail to keep pace with evolving missions and threats.

Most military software is not in a data center; it is deployed in the battlespace. It is in combat vehicles, radios, edge servers, weapon systems and drones. More and more of it is machine learning algorithms.

Edgecell is specifically designed to deploy software to such systems, tens of thousands of such systems. With Edgecell, the military can manage platforms as code and establish a continuous deployment process of software upgrades.

Drone warfare​

The military needs to be able to create ad hoc mission packages of drones. That means different drones from different manufacturers, even different military units, must be able to securely communicate with each other for a designated time period. Edgecell's edge private network makes such capability an instant reality.

The Russian military is jamming all radio spectrum and GPS within 5 to 10 kilometers of the front in Ukraine. Smart munitions and standard drone manage do not work in this environment. That means drones must rely even more on machine learning algorithms to navigate and identify targets independently. That means constant upgrading of software.