The ALICE-testbed project laid the ground for the new signal intelligence infrastructure of Armasuisse. The main characteristics of the data processing system under development are:
- it has to be capable of handling a considerable amount of incoming data, whicn f!ows through 40Gb connections;
- the synchronization is achieved via the best system commercially avaiiable (the WhiteRabbit protocol) to ensure that the largest amount of information is extracted from the data;
- it has to rely on standard components and protocols to avoid vendor Iock-in problems;
- it has to rely on standard components and protocols to avoid vendor Iock-in problems;
maintenance costs, increase efficiency and flexibility (using load balancing), and avoid the trasmission of already-processed data on potentially insecure lines (see Fig. 1)
The ALICE-testbed project focused on a first materialization of the infrastructure tomeasure the performances of the most critical sub-systems (particularly the server'network interface) and to demonstrate the feasibility of the processing.
ALICE will perform a more detailed hardware benchmarking, investigating the actual performance of the equipment that could potentially satisfy the requirements detailed by Armasuisse, with a particular bias towards GPUs. Moreover, further developments of the OpenCPl-based software stack are envisioned and a first set of signal processing algorithms wil! be developed,
resulting in a flexible source localization demonstrator.