The Apex Screening at Speed program fuses data from multiple sensor technologies and algorithms to detect potential threats in real time. The success of the program hinges on the fusion of data across multiple sensors to provide robust detection with no false negatives and few false positives. Another factor in the architecture of the system is that technology is continually evolving. This requires the flexibility to interconnect high volume raw sensor data with new algorithmic processing units with minimal (or no) impact on current operations. The program seeks to achieve these objectives while minimizing the overall system cost and footprint. Accipiter Systems provides a high throughput, low latency PCIe-based solution for directly interconnecting devices and systems at rack and LAN distances. PCIe is the de facto standard for interconnecting compute and storage devices (GPPs, GPUs, FPGAs, NVMe storage) to messaging systems (Ethernet). The proposed Accipiter solution eliminates the multiple levels of translation between compute and storage devices. This reduces latency, translation overhead, and ensures maximum data transfer rates. High performance switched interconnectivity enables the sharing of costly high-performance analysis systems across multiple sensor stations. The nature of the PCIe transport provides an inherent level of security not available with commoditized hardware. Accipiter Systems software provides the channel for transporting legacy protocols and rapid configuration of the interconnectivity of attached devices. This ensures the flexibility required into the future. Accipiter Systems will demonstrate the interconnectivity of multiple systems using this approach during this project.
