Real-time Java in modernization of the aegis weapon system
Kelvin Don Nilsen · 2012
The U.S. Navy's Aegis system, considered to be the "shield of the fleet", provides area air defense for a carrier battle group in addition to providing long-range ballistic missile defense. A typical Aegis deployment consists of about 100 computers, many of which have multiple cores. The application is distributed, with typical real-time threads spanning 4 or 5 different computers. End-to-end distributed thread timing constraints measured from stimulus to response are typically under 100 ms. The target jitter constraints on the individual contributions of processors to the end-to-end deadline constraint are well below 1 ms. The system is fully redundant to support fault tolerance. The software is considered to be safety critical because it aims and fires weapons.