Chimera

Chimera customers find its features appealing with fighting “vendor-lock” resulting from the ability of a 3rd party to provide best-in-breed modules. New modules are easily configured for placement into an upgraded system.

Chimera has efficient inter-module and inter-process communication with an emphasis on minimizing copying of data while maintaining its integrity.

Chimera built modules include:

Camera interfaces
Image processing algorithms
Artificial intelligence/machine learning inference engines
Command and Control
Communications such as DDS, OMS, and various IPC methods
Graphical User Interfaces

Flexible and Adaptable

Chimera’s flexibility enables execution in either a pipelined/graph-based topology or purely as a time slicing unconnected topology. Its modular design enables faster development times, reduced cost, and lower risks.

Benefits include:

Rapid and scalable open architecture mission system design and modernization
Significant reduction in recurring engineering tasks
Increased processing efficiency through intuitive data flow and manipulation to support dynamic resource use and management
Self-managed data queues and scalability at a thread, process, or processor level to maximize flexibility
Growing library of Chimera modules available for integration. Coding modules:
- Remove the need for developers to write and maintain complex code
- Enable simplified units of code that concentrate on critical processing
- Do not require Chimera source code changes
- Support independent module verification and built-in type protection for an extra layer of integration safety and effective unit testing

Real World Agile Data Processing

Chimera is designed for use in real world mission environments and thrives in image processing applications that require high-demand, processing-intensive and resource limited missions. This approach fosters a rapid development environment and reduces engineering task load.

Latency considerations are important for any image processing architecture. Chimera plugins are written to use available technologies such as NVIDIA CUDA to reduce latency. Docker, with the NVIDIA Docker extension, allows Chimera to interface directly with the graphics processing unit (GPU). Chimera was designed to accommodate scenarios where a user may have an environment with GPU limitations. In such a situation, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are made accessible to Chimera through Docker. A Chimera plugin places bytes into the FPGA memory space and another Chimera plugin retrieves the results.

Right Sized for the Mission

Chimera’s image processor expands into a distributed computing environment. Modules are added to each Chimera instance to pass large imagery and associated metadata between instances. Each Chimera can be “right-sized” to perform whatever is needed on each node. Chimera complements containerization by working at the thread level of the processing stack with containerization options like Docker working at a higher level.

Framework and Requirements

Chimera supports swift redeployment of mission processing capability through containerization via Docker. The use of containerization provides several benefits, including keeping applications separate from infrastructure.

Dependencies of the application are wrapped into the container and health checks provide automatic mitigation of container or hardware failures. Container-tagging capability permits previous software versions to be available in the event that a user needs to perform a software fall back. The use of containers provides an environment that is safe for development and does not affect the entire code base. This functionality allows for Chimera instances to be managed without user management.

The Chimera software is composed of Chimera, Lycia and their dependencies.

Chimera modules are coded in C++ 17
Chimera will run on any POSIX compliant modern operating system
Chimera provides a framework for developing modules that permits Lycia the capability to load and execute dynamic libraries
Kubernetes and Docker supported containers
Lycia is offered as an associated executable and can be used to instantiate a Chimera environment, read configuration files and contain the Chimera runtime
Forge is the Chimera development environment that can be tailored to specific customer needs
XML and JSON libraries provide support for parsing configuration files
Time provides formatting for timestamps

Chimera Pro and Services

Need development help? Let L3Harris develop your modules using the Chimera framework. Request Services
Need to take your application development efforts to the next level? Inquire about the Chimera Pro suite
Features include:
- Optimized inter-process and inter-container communication modules encapsulating RDMA, Shared Memory and ethernet communications.
- Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for module configuration and layout.
- Real-time monitoring and optimization tools
- Enhanced Testing suite for the module level to complement unit and system testing