On October 15, the US Army will send a supercomputer to Afghanistan, but it will not be installed on a well-guarded base or in an underground bunker, but on a huge airship that will be able to fly at high altitude and observe a huge territory for a week.
This is the result of the ambitious, $ 211 million, Blue Devil project. Currently, this airship, which is a huge aircraft with a length of more than 400 meters, has yet to be assembled. The idea of the military is to equip the airship with a dozen different sensors that will be constantly connected to each other. The supercomputer will process the data coming from them and automatically point the sensors in the actual direction, for example, at a person reporting an upcoming ambush. Airship onboard equipment should minimize the need for human analysts. The goal is to obtain information and bring it to ground forces in less than 15 seconds. Against the background of today's cumbersome and time-consuming data exchange between different observation platforms and control centers, this sounds like a fantasy. However, if successful, Blue Devil will change the nature of aerial surveillance and minimize the time between requesting and receiving information.
The first phase of the Blue Devil project is in full swing: late last year, four modified surveillance aircraft equipped with an array of sensors, developed as part of the airship project, flew to Afghanistan.
The second stage (assembly and equipment) will be much larger and more complex. It is planned to build an airship 100 m larger than a football field, with a volume of 39.6 thousand m3. The military reckons that such a huge aircraft can take enough fuel and helium to stay in the air for a week at an altitude of almost 6 km (most airships fly at an altitude of 1 km or less).
The Blue Devil's greatest strength, however, is not size, altitude, or flight duration, but sophisticated hardware and software. In addition to an array of sensors such as eavesdropping devices, day / night cameras, communications equipment and others, Blue Devil will be equipped with an onboard WAAS surveillance system. A similar system is currently used on unmanned aircraft Reaper and consists of a dozen different cameras that monitor the surface within a radius of 12 km. The sensors and all onboard equipment of the airship will be installed on retractable pallets developed by Mav6 LLC, which will make it easy to reconfigure and maintain the aircraft.
WAAS can use 96 cameras and produce up to 274 terabytes of information every hour, which, according to the military, requires 2,000 people to process the footage. By transmitting information via satellite to analysts at ground-based bases, it is impossible to solve the problem of processing such an amount of data, so a supercomputer will be installed on board Blue Devil, equivalent to a server with 2,000 single-core processors, which can process up to 300 terabytes of data per hour. At the same time, he will not only send observation data to ground units, but process information, marking the time and place of observation. Thanks to this, the commander can quickly receive intelligence data in a certain area.
