Northrop Grumman Australia opens distributed integration lab in Canberra
Northrop Grumman Australia has opened its new $20 million state-of-the-art systems integration, advanced mission visualisation and demonstration facility, Parallax Labs.
This new Parallax Labs is the first of its kind for Northrop Grumman anywhere in the world. It is headquartered in Canberra but unlike traditional labs which are confined to a physical space, it is a truly distributed environment which can be easily scaled through the cloud to incorporate new capabilities and locations in Australia and overseas. The Parallax Labs is accredited by Defence, so it enables Northrop Grumman Australia to link directly into multiple Defence accredited establishments around Australia from Canberra.
“We are committed to developing and investing in sovereign Australian capability” said Christine Zeitz, general manager Asia Pacific, Northrop Grumman. “Parallax Labs represents a critical component of how Northrop Grumman Australia can support projects with complex system architectures and highly integrated technologies. Importantly, it also serves to facilitate the transfer of technology and the development of Australian critical technology skills that will benefit Australia’s defence industry now and into the future.”
Parallax Labs pulls together a distributed systems and software development, integration and test environment with cutting-edge mission visualisation and demonstration capabilities. The fully immersive and interactive operations room-style environment incorporates large-area displays and reconfigurable technologies to enable key stakeholders to fully envision and test technology and solutions approaches.
Northrop Grumman’s Parallax Labs is designed to showcase the company’s local and international capabilities with industry partners, customers and technology organisations in a way that preserves the integrity of controlled information with classified, export and trade controlled or sensitive priority information.
Parallax Labs brings the advantages of model-based systems engineering, advanced simulation and high levels of automation to systems development, integration and test activities. These enablers are crucial to doing Agile DevSecOps at scale with the dependability customers require for critical mission systems.
The opening was attended by the Australian Minister for Defence Industry and Minister for Science and Technology, Melissa Price, Deputy Secretary Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group, Tony Fraser, and Australian defence industry partners.
Parallax is derived from the Ancient Greek word, parallaxis, explaining the physical phenomenon whereby an object’s position or direction appears to differ when viewed from different lines of sight. A key feature of the customer and partner collaboration that drives the development of Northrop Grumman systems is the bringing together of parties with unique viewpoints.