By: Tom Fries, Director of Government Sales
OSS PCIe-based products deliver critical advantages for modern military sensor systems by enabling real-time data acquisition, processing, and transmission in rugged, mission-critical environments. These benefits stem from their ability to support high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects, modular scalability, and environmental resilience, all of which are essential for today’s advanced military platforms.
Military sensors—including radar, electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR), electronic warfare, and video systems—generate enormous volumes of data that must be processed and acted upon quickly. OSS’s PCIe expansion platforms, Host Interface Boards (HIBs), and rugged embedded systems provide a direct memory access (DMA) path and high-bandwidth connectivity between these sensors and compute elements such as FPGAs, GPUs, and AI accelerators. With support for PCIe Gen5 and soon to be released PCIe Gen6 products, OSS can provide up to 256 GB/s bi-directional bandwidth over a single x16 link, enabling low-latency, high-throughput performance required for real-time applications like threat detection, target tracking, and sensor fusion.
OSS’s experience with PCIe DMA fabric technology results in high performance products that can not only support high speed and high bandwidth sensor data, but also provides the storage write performance needed to record large amounts of sensor data. The latest NVMe technology combined with OSS Ion Accelerator™ SAN, NAS and data recorder software, provide up to two petabytes of high speed and easily removable storage. The ease of removal provides a practical method to transfer data quickly from one compute platform to another or physically secure the data.
Ruggedness and durability is another feature of OSS solutions. Combined ARM and GPU products like Donati, Cernis, and the Sensor Concentrator PCIe Compute Nodes are ruggedized for MIL-STD-810H land vehicle compliance and operate in extreme temperature, shock, and vibration conditions. These systems support conduction cooling, sealed enclosures, and secure, modular form factors designed for harsh deployments. This ensures reliable performance in real-world battlefield scenarios, from airborne ISR platforms to naval vessels and autonomous ground systems.
OSS products support modern software and telemetry capabilities through the U-BMC management, monitoring and control platform. The made-in-USA U-BMC enables secure dynamic system monitoring, fan control, secure firmware updates, and telemetry for health, power, and performance—critical features for remote, unmanned, or autonomous military systems.
Finally, OSS’ integration of PCIe fabric technologies with scale-out FPGA sensor ingest, GPU AI/ML, and NVMe storage capabilities is being enhanced with the latest CXL main memory pooling technologies, providing a path forward for disaggregated, intelligent data infrastructure architectures. This supports emerging military computing paradigms where memory and compute resources are dynamically pooled and assigned to mission workloads, enhancing both system efficiency and adaptability.
In summary, OSS PCIe products deliver the high-performance interconnect, rugged design, and scalable architecture that modern military sensor applications demand—enabling faster decisions, increased platform flexibility, and improved mission outcomes.
Before starting college in 2022, I had considered artificial intelligence (AI) a thing of the future, something I wouldn’t see until I was later in my years. With the birth of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and the rise of machine learning systems, my world flipped on its head. Since joining the tech industry, I see I am not alone with this experience. From one year to the next, there is no telling what kind of technological developments we will bear witness to. When it comes to the defense and security of our nation, capitalizing on these advancements is paramount, lest we fall behind our adversaries. As a result, within the defense industry, marketers are required to become adaptable to the shifting needs of their company’s customers.
My time at the booth was spent listening to my colleagues interacting with partners and potential customers. Watching these exchanges, I recognized what was at the heart of West—the real reason why hundreds of people had shown up during the work week to surround themselves with others in the defense industry. The obvious explanations come to mind: to meet customers, establish connections, solidify a brand’s image, and feel out competitors. But when I took a step back to study the messaging on the booths and walk the floor, I saw what I had studied for years as a marketing student come to life. Every conversation and display was geared toward answering one two-part question:
“What do my customers want, and how can my product(s) solve their problem?”
As data-intensive workloads continue to grow across industries like AI, defense, autonomous systems, and high-performance computing (HPC), the need for scalable, high-speed infrastructure has never been greater. Organizations are increasingly hitting the physical and performance limits of traditional server architectures—especially when it comes to GPU density, storage bandwidth, and I/O flexibility.
This is where PCIe Expansion Systems come into play. By extending the capabilities of existing servers, PCIe Expansion enables businesses to scale performance efficiently without complete infrastructure overhauls. In this blog, we’ll explore the key benefits of PCIe Expansion, including how expansion backplanes, GPU expansion, and emerging technologies like CXL and PCIe 6.0 are shaping the future of computing.
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