The High Performance Embedded Software Initiative addresses the military need to advance the state of embedded software development tools, libraries, and methodologies to retain the nation's military technology advantage in increasingly software-based systems. The initiative involves a partnership of industry, academia, and government organizations to foster software technology insertion demonstrations, to advance the development of existing standards, and to promote a unified computation/communication embedded software standard. The goal of the initiative is software portability: to enable "write-once/run-anywhere" for applications of high performance embedded computing.

This initiative is a unique opportunity to direct future standard development so that the needs of your community are addressed. Specifically, this initiative is targeted at bridging the gap between research community and the acquisition programs. It includes three basic components to ensure that acquisition office needs are being addressed:

Demonstration: Evolving embedded standards are being benchmarked and tested in real application examples. Prime contractors are teamed with FFRDC or academic partners to use currently defined standards, evaluate their performance, and report on how well their needs are being met. These evaluations direct the other efforts in this program to refocus evolving standards so that the long-term needs will be addressed.

Development: The existing standards are being extended to address the military requirements and incorporate object-oriented practices already prototyped by the research community that provide dramatic improvements in portability and productivity while retaining optimized performance. This effort is tightly coupled with military demonstrations and provides the next generation standards with direct feedback from the military user base.

Prototype: Currently distinct computation and communication standards are being merged into a unified computation/communication standard providing full cross-platform portability with further improvements in productivity. This prototyping effort is tightly coupled with actual military case studies to ensure that optimized performance is not sacrificed.