Blue Devil II

The Blue Devil was a proposed reconnaissance airship that was built for the United States Air Force for use in the War in Afghanistan. It was designed to capture and process data from onboard sensors before delivering it to ground troops.

The blimp was equipped with up to a dozen sensors, including listening devices, video cameras for use both during the day and at night, communications equipment and a system known as the "wide-area airborne surveillance system", which used several cameras to film areas several square miles in size, similar to the Gorgon Stare system. The sensor equipment was to be supplied by Mav6 LLC as the prime contractor and system integrator. To process the data collected, which would ordinarily be transmitted to analysts on the ground, the blimp used an onboard computer to analyze and store the data, which was to be available for troops to access. This would require fewer personnel to analyze the data, and would cause less strain on battlefield networks by transmitting only required information, rather than a constant stream of data.

YottaStor delivered our YottaFuse Edge Node utilizing our patented process. YottaStor was responsible for the onboard system to store and analyze the data and transmitting the required information to the warfighter on the ground.

YottaFuse was specifically developed to support the high-performance computing requirements of the next generation sensors. This new requirement presents challenges that can only be met by exploiting the most leading-edge computing technologies. Simply put, the future of sensor computing solution requires HPC capabilities, i.e. supercomputer-like IO and big data storage capacity in a small, light-weight, low-power package that can operate in an austere computing environment  like Blue Devil II where the tradeoffs between SWaP must be optimized to deliver the required computing capacity.