Mercury ships dual GPU open processor system

Industry’s highest performance OpenVPX, dual-GPU, conduction-cooled subsystem


By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Mercury Computer Systems has started shipping the industry’s highest performance 6U module-based OpenVPX, dual GPU-based conduction-cooled subsystem, using whichever high power GPU is available. This subsystem is currently deployed in an embedded rugged defense surveillance platform, performing processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED).
One of the toughest challenges is to improve the military situational awareness through timely and precise delivery of actionable information by improved PED capabilities. Mercury’s subsystems are designed to provide these Embedded Smart Processing capabilities, enabling sensors to be smarter, able to accept unrelenting streams of data, and extract and deliver situational awareness and other crucial information.
Mercury’s scalable ISR subsystem is powered by the Ensemble 6000 Series GSC6200 – an OpenVPX module powered by GPU technology working in conjunction with Intel-based processing in a conduction-cooled, 6U form factor. The subsystem currently delivers performance in the TeraFLOPS range, and the incorporation of GPUs enables the solution to be delivered in an optimized size, weight, and power (SWaP) footprint. Mercury’s innovative packaging technology on the GSC6200 leverages the easy-to-upgrade MxM GPU form factor, which enables customers to rapidly upgrade and deploy the latest and fastest GPUs from ATI or NVIDIA, resulting in even higher performance.
“Our services and systems integration expertise allows us to offer our latest technology in a subsystem solution. This allows our customers to reduce their development risk while enabling concurrent engineering, ultimately leading to increased product velocity. Also, our approach of using standards-based, open APIs results in a subsystem which is open, a key requirement of our customers and as well as the U.S. Department of Defense,” said Steve Patterson, Vice President of Defense Product Line Management at Mercury.
“Mercury’s new OpenVPX GSC6200 module leverages the best available technologies while providing a clear migration path for customers to implement emerging GPUs from either ATI or NVIDIA in the future. This enables our customers to offer best of breed solutions for the industry’s most demanding high-end signal and image processing applications,” he added.
In addition to the GSC6200, other critical modules and services enabled the successful production of this subsystem. Mercury’s Services and Systems Integration team combined a multi-vendor hardware and software approach with their expert integration services to create the subsystem. The GSC6200 is providing industry-leading processing and exploitation capabilities to enable substantial SWaP improvements and parallel stream computing capabilities.

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