The U.S. Space Force conducted critical design review efforts for a weather system follow-on microwave technology built to transmit weather data to warfighters.

The platform also received a Milestone B certification and a program approval after the service branch reviewed supporting regulatory and statutory requirements, USSF said Monday.

The WSF-M program seeks to develop weather technologies that will work to facilitate mission operations and planning through the provision of weather data to meteorologists. Ball Aerospace secured a $94M contract in 2017 to carry out system design and risk assessment services for the platform.

The milestone standardizes the microwave technology's program execution standards such as schedule caps and potential costs.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is working with the U.S. Air Force to test physical cases designed to bolster the security of mobile devices used by airmen, Fedscoop reported Tuesday.

These cases cover cameras and shield phones with signal jamming and biometrics to allow the devices for use in facilities with strict security requirements. The effort aims to boost the security of commercial devices and also implement stricter access management.

Steve Wallace, who leads DISA’s emerging technology directorate, said tests will resume when the COVID-19 pandemic ends. He and Frank Konieczny, USAF's chief technology officer, spoke about the effort at a virtual event with Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

Pivot3 has launched a new platform for video surveillance solutions that will enable organizations to better support mission-critical security operations with Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and AMD EPYC processors, the company announced on Tuesday. 

"Lenovo is collaborating with Pivot3 to deliver innovative solutions that empower customers  with the performance they need to handle today's fast-paced environments while eliminating their challenges,” said Kamran Amini, vice president and general manager of server, storage and software defined infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group. 

Pivot3’s solution will be powered by the next generation Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 server platform with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor to deliver 10 percent lower cost per terabyte, 14 percent better capacity density and 100 percent more bandwidth than similar solutions. The solution will improve camera density at a lower overall TCO for customers who consider their video mission critical.

"More and more customers are juggling how to enable better business decisions through technology, including capturing, storing and analyzing massive amounts of video data to enable real-time decision making with tight budgets," added Amini.  

Pivot3’s integration of Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 server into Pivot3 Surveillance Series appliances will provide the performance of a dual-socket server.  The single-socket configuration also offers the potential of up to 50 percent savings on software licensing compared to the dual socket x86 alternative without sacrificing any performance. 

In addition, the Pivot3 video solutions will support PCIe 4 to deliver 100 percent bandwidth increases compared to PCIe 3. The update will enable customers to receive more bandwidth for video recording and 150 percent increase in networking speed, with 25GbE support to enable faster video transfer from the edge.

Pivot3 will capture growth of video to capture, store and analyze massive amounts of video data while controlling infrastructure investments. The solutions will combine the power of the AMD EPYC processors along with Pivot3's software optimized for video workloads to help ensure video loss and degradation never occur and video is always accessible and available.

"AMD EPYC processors provide an additional layer of value to the new Pivot3 platforms, empowering customers to make the most of their budgets upfront while increasing cost-effectiveness over time, critical for businesses that seek to expand their video deployments as needs evolve," said Greg Gibby, senior product marketing manager, data center products, AMD.

The company’s solution will also provide non-disruptive scalability and intelligent monitoring and analytics capabilities for real-time system health monitoring to maximize system uptime and reduce time to repair.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR655 will allow servers to be configured to support the massive processing requirements of new video analytics applications. Customers can deploy one modular, flexible software-defined platform to meet all their mixed security-workload requirements to reduce complexity and cost of ownership over traditional 3-tier proprietary systems or bare-metal servers.

"While video data output is growing, budgets have remained the same and this leaves security and IT professionals challenged on how to deliver on security and safety imperatives," said Ben Bolles, vice president of product, Pivot3. "Building on more than a decade of experience creating solutions purpose-built for video and leveraging the latest in processing technologies, Pivot3 delivers the performance and economics that today's security decision-makers require."

About Pivot3

Pivot3 is the leading provider of intelligent hyperconverged infrastructure solutions for video surveillance, video analytics, VDI, and mixed workloads. Pivot3's solutions provide security, resilience, and management simplicity at scale for customers' mission-critical environments.

With thousands of customers in 64 countries, and deployments in education, hospitality, transportation, government, defense, healthcare, gaming, financial services, and retail, Pivot3 allows IT to manage complexity at scale through intelligence and automation.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Lyell Immunopharma will transport its cloud infrastructure to AWS as the company’s standard for machine learning (ML) workloads, AWS reported on Wednesday. 

“Lyell runs on AWS because we enable them to build and test applications quickly, and gain insights into vast amounts of data, with the goal of enabling them to bring new therapies to market, which is so important in a world where we are all touched by someone who has been afflicted with cancer,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. 

Lyell will leverage AWS’s scalable infrastructure to run its secure data and analytics platform and support its high-performance computing workloads to accelerate the research of new cell therapies as it searches for cures for cancer.

AWS’s services will help Lyell analyze insights in scientific data on how the immune system can fight cancer, as well as expedite the company’s research. One of Lyell's recent initiatives will  develop immunotherapies with high performance computing (HPC) clusters. The project will help scientists design new protein structures to engineer immune cells that are more capable of fighting cancer. 

“We chose AWS because its unmatched portfolio of cloud services provides us with the environment and resources we need to research, design, and develop immunotherapies, all of which wouldn’t be possible at the speed and scale we are looking for, without the elasticity of the cloud,” said Rick Klausner, M.D., Founder and Chief Executive Officer. 

AWS’s secure and elastic compute capacity will enable Lyell to design and test potential new cell therapy constructs at a faster rate. Lyell will be able to conduct 30 simulations in 10 hours as opposed to a single simulation in four weeks, before joining AWS. 

Lyell will build a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and leverage AWS analytics services like Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR to analyze petabytes of research, clinical and manufacturing data to gain insights into immune cell functionality faster than before. 

Lyell will also incorporate Amazon SageMaker to enable scientists to build, train and deploy ML models. The models enable automated image analysis and optimization of protein structures, which will facilitate Lyell’s mission to cure cancer.

“By adopting cloud-first strategies on AWS and leveraging the most comprehensive set of cloud services in the industry, innovators like Lyell are able to build and scale their businesses, disrupting longstanding business models and inventing new ones,” added Clayville. 

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. 

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. 

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.