I was only reading an article on Boeing yesterday and wondering if they were an EAP. This was from 2019.
Physics Today
72, 10, 28 (2019);
https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4316
Every hour during an airliner flight, dozens of sensors monitoring thousands of parameters produce around 1.5 terabytes of information. As more sensors are added in next-generation aircraft to detect maintenance issues before they become a problem, the volume of data is expected to increase 10-fold, and more than a petabyte of information could be generated during a 10-hour flight.
Jay Lowell is a
Boeing senior technical fellow and one of more than 90 physicists who work at Boeing Research & Technology, the aerospace giant’s central R&D organization. He and his team will have to cope with that growing data avalanche. He believes
neuromorphic processors—chips configured like neural networks—can help address the onboard data-processing crunch and flag abnormal situations. “They are exceedingly efficient for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications,” he says.
But running machine learning and artificial intelligence programs with current processor technology would require tens or hundreds of kilowatts of power, compared with the 50 watts typically used by today’s planes to process maintenance data. There will never be enough bandwidth to transfer all that data from a fleet of aircraft to the cloud for processing, Lowell adds, noting that around 10 000 Boeing 737s alone are currently in service.
The data problem is one of the challenges Boeing physicists are working on under the rubric of the company’s initiative on disruptive computing and networks. A second thrust seeks to advance high-performance computing architectures by pairing central processing units with coprocessors such as graphics processing units. GPUs are “exceedingly more efficient” than CPUs at performing a smaller number of specific tasks, Lowell says. Boeing is looking at architectures that use a wider variety of coprocessors than today’s top-performing supercomputers do. Looking further out, Boeing sees a future in quantum sensing and computing to address such problems as optimization in manufacturing.
