January 13, 201115 yr Randomly happened upon this when looking through the Navy Laser Testing blog post. http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2008...vy/2008arci.pdf Is that not a frank and earnest evaluation or what! Insufficient testing before sending submarines to sea. How does it feel when you are tailing an Akula II and the sonar computers crash? Even more telling may be some of the conclusions reached about the program not improving performance even beyond the goals established in 1998.
January 13, 201115 yr I haven't been able to pull down that report, or the 2009 report either, for that matter, but I do know that they have continued to pump money into the A-RCI program, with a contract award as recent as November past.
January 14, 201115 yr Author I really do think an agile approach to developing ever more advanced signal processing software using commercial hardware is the way to go. What I don't want to see and would guess might be happening is that those systems are going to sea untested, potentially endangering the submarines more than not having the fancy new gizmo would. The lure of using not only CPUs but GPUs to crunch the numbers is great. If it filters out the seamount in front of you because the software is flawed or doesn't notice that diesel sub that it should, that's a problem. imho a responsible amount of testing and evaluation needs to be done with every release of the hardware/software combination. A steady output of new releases doesn't speak to whether the releases have merit or increase capability. Oh, and some training would be nice. What do you bet the manuals are 5 years old and not all that applicable to the current release?
January 14, 201115 yr I really do think an agile approach to developing ever more advanced signal processing software using commercial hardware is the way to go. What I don't want to see and would guess might be happening is that those systems are going to sea untested, potentially endangering the submarines more than not having the fancy new gizmo would. The lure of using not only CPUs but GPUs to crunch the numbers is great. If it filters out the seamount in front of you because the software is flawed or doesn't notice that diesel sub that it should, that's a problem. imho a responsible amount of testing and evaluation needs to be done with every release of the hardware/software combination. A steady output of new releases doesn't speak to whether the releases have merit or increase capability. Oh, and some training would be nice. What do you bet the manuals are 5 years old and not all that applicable to the current release? Can't disagree with any of that. The best computing hardware in the world is worse than useless without functional software.
February 13, 201115 yr The Defense Science Board (DSB) recently mentioned A-RCI as an example of a successful phased program. Perspective is everything, I suppose.
Create an account or sign in to comment