APPLICATIONS

Collaboration with Mentor Graphics delivers innovative Cell-based platform for the electronic design automation industry: Mercury Computer Systems has been named winner of the "Best IBM Embedded Power Architecture Solution" award in the annual IBM PartnerWorld Beacon Awards competition. The competition recognizes IBM Business Partners for their ingenuity, innovation, customer satisfaction, and for outstanding achievements in providing on-demand business solutions. Mercury collaborated with Mentor Graphics to design and develop a fully integrated electronic design automation (EDA) platform based on the Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor. Mercury successfully migrated Mentor's Calibre nmOPC EDA software product to its Cell BE processor-based high-performance compute cluster. The novel platform combines a standard compute cluster with a coprocessor cluster comprised of Mercury's Dual Cell-Based Blades in a pre-integrated IBM BladeCenter system. Mercury provides Mentor with optimized libraries and other middleware developed specifically for the Cell BE processor to complete the system integration. "Mercury's broad expertise in hardware acceleration enabled us to evaluate a variety of co-processor accelerator alternatives quickly," said Charlie Albertalli, Marketing Director for Mentor Graphics. “This was a good technology match and a good organizational match." Leveraging Mercury's 24 years of experience in optimizing application performance, and the Mercury MultiCore Plus SDK (Software Development Kit), the companies have achieved an order-of-magnitude performance improvement for the new-generation platform. Mentor Graphics expects its customers to realize significant productivity gains and total cost of ownership reductions as a result of this solution. "We're pleased to play a role in helping Mentor Graphics to bring their accelerated EDA solution to the market," said Mark Skalabrin, Vice President and General Manager of the Advanced Solutions business at Mercury. "Mentor's innovative Calibre nmOPC software, combined with Mercury's industry-leading application acceleration solution, enables Mentor to provide transformational performance gains to their customers." "Recognized by the Beacon Awards, Mercury Computer Systems has worked closely with IBM and its Business Partners to provide clients with innovative solutions that solve real business issues," said Ravi Marwaha, general manager, IBM Global Business Partners. "Mercury Computer Systems has set the standard for business excellence by delivering unique solutions as well as high customer satisfaction." To learn more about the Mentor Graphics partnership and Mercury's Cell-BE processor-based solutions, visit its Web site, or contact Mercury at (866) 627-6951.