Ballistic Missile Defense Organization

Contact:
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization
Virtual Data Center
http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/bmdolink.html

Tools Used:
CORBA®, IIOP™, Object Oriented Concepts' ORBacus®

Description:
Over the past fifteen years, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) has invested several billion dollars in the execution of experimental measurement and technology demonstration programs to collect one-of-a-kind data and information needed to develop Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems. The effective exploitation of this highly technical data and information depends on an efficient process to provide the widest possible access and distribution of the assets to the engineers, analysts, and experts responsible for developing BMD systems.

Problem:
To access data and information at the Data Centers, users identify what information is available to meet their needs, determine where it is located, and request the data from the supporting Data Center. The Data Centers also provide resident data expertise to assist users in locating and using data archived in their facilities, and they maintain extensive analysis support capabilities and subject matter experts at their sites to help visiting analysts.

The concept of providing readily accessible electronic connectivity to Data Center resources and services has been part of the BMDO vision for the Data Centers Program almost since its inception. However, technology has only recently matured sufficiently to achieve a workable and cost-effective solution.

The impetus for the current "Virtual" Data Center (VDC) initiative evolved from a March 1996 recommendation of the Independent Surveillance Science and Engineering Group (ISSEG) -- "The BMDO needs to create a system that will allow analysts access to data and information from geographically distributed locations.”

Solution:
The VDC is a single point-of-entry to a wide spectrum of resources that analysts and modelers can access right from their workstations. VDC users have remote access to ballistic missile data, information, and models from widely distributed locations. The VDC serves as the BMDO's premier, mission-orientated, secure communication tool for exchanging data and information among the Modeling and Simulation, Test and Evaluation, Wargaming, and system engineering communities. A major objective of the VDC is enhanced analysis and technical support for the Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs).

The "Virtual" Data Center builds on the current Data Centers Program concept of operation. The BMDO Data Centers continue their roles as repositories for the BMD data and information and as sources of data expertise. The VDC enables network connectivity between the Data Centers and their users. The VDC also extends this connectivity to additional information repositories and Centers of Expertise that make available specialized resources of data, information, and expertise.

• The key functional capabilities the VDC adds to the Data Centers Program include:

• Network connectivity among information repositories, analysts, researchers, and system engineers

• A secure network environment (SECRET System High) with a single sign-on solution

• Exploitation of current Internet and Web technologies to enhance user access and ease-of-use, including E-mail, news groups, and forums for information transfer

• Search mechanisms that use CORBA/IIOP to support interoperability between distributed data bases and catalogs

• On-line distributed data and information searches

• On-line distributed data manipulation and display  

• On-line distributed processing

• Automated product ordering and delivery

• Access to distributed models and simulations
  

The BMD Data Centers are widely distributed in geographic location. The need for a distributed component architecture was recognized early in the analysis and design phases of the VDC. They also recognized that the VDC would need to be stable, responsive, flexible to requirements creep, and scalable enough to support any number of BMD Data Centers. Given these tough demands, the choice between COM/DCOM, Java RMI, and CORBA®/IIOP was not difficult. They needed to ensure multi-language

and heterogeneous platform support that only CORBA/IIOP could offer. With this issue resolved, their next task was to find the CORBA ORB and Common Object Services (Cos) implementations that could meet the demanding requirements of the VDC.  The initial choice was to go with the most popular commercial ORB. BMDO quickly realized that high costs and functional limitations in the chosen ORB would decrease their chances of success. To resolve the dilemma they began a search for an inexpensive, strictly compliant, robust ORB with a history of reliable technical support. It did not take long to discover that OOC and ORBacus could meet the BMDO’s needs. 

“The utilization of CORBA within the "Virtual" Data Center" software architecture not only enables reliable access to distributed data sets but also allows for future incorporation of validated, legacy analysis and post processing tools in a distributed, multi-language, and heterogeneous platform environment," said Scott Evans, software architect, Computational Physics, Inc.

The “Virtual” Data Center, which is now operational, consists of about twenty core servers and client/servers, all written completely in Java. In addition to the core system, each BMD Data Center hosts three servers that support data queries and processing. The client side of the system is driven by HTML and CORBA-enabled servlets with the back end of the system running on top of an Oracle database. The core system also includes a Java GUI that is used to monitor the entire system and to dynamically activate and deactivate VDC servers. The response time of the VDC is well within requirements and the stability of the VDC and the ORBacus ORB in particular has been excellent.

Through the “Virtual” Data Center, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization has realized its dream to “place data on the analyst's desktop.”