LINTHICUM, Md., Nov. 8, 2017– The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) to collaborate on the development of a graph processor chip that aims to vastly enhance efficiencies and capabilities of today’s top processors.

As a part of DARPA’s newly instated Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) program, Northrop Grumman will work with five other entities to implement and evaluate real-time performance of various graph algorithms in a newly developed HIVE chip. HIVE seeks to create and integrate technologies that will potentially lead to the development of a generic graph processor, responsible for quickly analyzing large data sets to determine correlations and dependencies that were not able to be discovered before.

This type of development could be critical in cybersecurity, intelligence integration and network analysis, especially as it relates to the Department of Defense (DoD). Northrop Grumman contributions to HIVE will assess the potential for graph analytics to resolve DoD processing challenges while also gaining a better understanding into how the analytics are currently used in DoD systems.

“The goal of the HIVE program is to enable our customers to make better decisions with the copious amounts of data generated every day. This program endeavors to produce technology breakthroughs that will transform cognitive systems and advance analytics for many years,” said Vern Boyle, vice president, cyber and advanced processing, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems.

Northrop Grumman will work to solve the problem facing today’s top processors. Currently, there are few programming models and generalized processor architectures that can effectively support the irregular memory accesses and fine grained concurrency requirements of static and dynamic/streaming graph analytics, while also providing accelerated run-time support. The ability to quickly identify commonalities, patterns and dependencies in order to predict outcomes is vital due to the high volume and variety of data being generated every day.

The HIVE program will address three key technical areas including: graph analytic processors, graph analytics toolkits and system evaluation. As the single performer selected for system evaluation, Northrop Grumman will identify and develop static and streaming graph analytics to solve five types of problem areas including: anomaly detection, domain specific search, dependency mapping, N-x contingency analysis and causal modeling of events. This project will focus on identifying new uses for graph analytics that have not been included in previous research due to processing, power or size constraints.

Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in autonomous systems, cyber, C4ISR, strike, and logistics and modernization to customers worldwide. Please visit news.northropgrumman.com and follow us on Twitter, @NGCNews, for more information.

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Source: Northrop Grumman