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February 22, 5:25 EST
PITTSFIELD, Mass. -- Officials at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, a unit of General Dynamics, recently selected computing and visualization systems from SGI in Mountain View, Calif., to power the U.S. Navy's new Area Air Defense Commander (AADC) Capability system.
The AADC Capability program is a battlespace management system that will help the military services plan and coordinate joint theater air and missile defenses against ballistic and tactical missile attacks by providing the Joint Forces Commander with a fully integrated air defense capability, SGI officials say. The system uses SGI technology to provide an integrated picture of the battlespace so that a Joint Forces Commander can quickly gather data on air and missile attacks and develop an air defense plan that recommends tactical placement of air defense assets from land and sea, company officials say.
The latest delivery of SGI systems to General Dynamics, under the AADC Capability program, includes a 32-processor SGI Origin 3400 server, four SGI Onyx 3000 series high-performance graphics systems, eight Silicon Graphics Octane2 visualization workstations and a Silicon Graphics O2+ graphics workstation. These systems will be used to power General Dynamics' AADC Capability integrated testing facility in Greensboro, N.C., to aid shipboard AADC Capability installations.
AADC Capability units have already been installed and fielded aboard the U.S. Navy's command and control ship USS Mount Whitney and the Aegis cruiser USS Shiloh. The Navy has identified 17 other sites for AADC Capability installations including other command and control ships, Aegis-class cruisers, and other facilities.
"Our company focus on enabling Visual Area Networks is well suited to support battle management applications that allow systems like the AADC Capability to track aircraft and missiles in near real time, providing vital friend-or-foe data while giving commanders a 3-D air picture of the theater of operations," says John Burwell, senior director of government industry at SGI. "Our high-performance visualization systems, with their superb resolution and near real-time accuracy, support the fusion of disparate data sources, including geospatial information, video, visual databases, and computational data."
AADC Capability's near real-time collaboration and war-gaming capability is embedded, so that every potential course of action and outcome is demonstrated before it is executed. Once a course of action is selected, a commander can monitor events as they unfold, reacting to new threats and changing situations as they arise, SGI officials say.
The General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems AADC Capability team is working closely with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. The Johns Hopkins lab developed the initial AADC prototype, which was also powered by SGI servers and visualization systems, company officials say. The General Dynamics AADC Capability solution features an open systems architecture that is expandable to meet the Navy's current and future operational requirements.
For more information on SGI computing and visualization systems contact the company on the World Wide Web at http://www.sgi.com.
Military & Aerospace Electronics
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