APPLICATIONS

Today MNB Technologies, Inc of Bloomington, IN announced award of a contract to develop a new class of wearable supercomputer for the United States Department of Defense. MNB is acting under subcontract to Cole Engineering Services, Inc of Orlando, FL to design the new hardware and modified operating systems as part of a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program to develop a field-portable modeling, simulation, and training system called “Simulation Center in a Box”. In parallel with MNB’s hardware development program, Cole Engineering will be developing the server and client application software, creating deployment strategies, and performing system integration. Nick Granny, MNB’s Chief Technical Officer said— “High Performance Computing (Supercomputing) has been a mainstay of the scientific and engineering communities for decades. It is also heavily used by the military not only for research and planning, but also for modeling, simulation, and training. But traditional supercomputers are not portable, so military personnel must travel to the computer instead of the computer traveling to the users. This is very expensive, time consuming, and has the potential to interfere with an organization’s combat availability.” The new wearable system is the size of a paperback book clipped to the users’ belt, a wireless folding keyboard and mouse is the primary input, and a high-definition head mounted display similar in appearance to a tennis visor provides imagery equivalent of a 52” HDTV viewed from 6 feet. The new computers also have WiFi (802.11g) capabilities and hardwired Gigabit Ethernet, 1GB of main memory and up to 140GB of disk capacity supporting their 1.6GHz X86 architecture processors. The system performance is advanced into the 12GFLOP range with an embedded FPGA-based accelerator giving each of the wearable computers the raw performance of roughly six dual-core personal computers. Overall portable cluster performance is further enhanced through the use of MNB’s Network Attached Accelerator modules. Martina Barnas, MNB’s Chief Science Officer said— “We’re addressing the programming model’s utility as well as the hardware. Historically reconfigurable computing has been difficult to use because of the specialized skills needed to create reliable application programs. With the wearable supercomputer we’ve streamlined the development model and extended it so that new applications can be crafted in C++, C#, J#, or Visual Basic and be object-code transportable across Windows, Windows-CE, Windows-Mobile, and embedded Linux operating systems by using the .NET framework. The hardware accelerated algorithms are written in ANSI C and are then synthesized into modules that “plug-in” to our SolutionBus framework in the FPGA’s. When acting as ad-hoc clusters, the systems will use our turboSOA distributed acceleration services framework.” The new class of computer is expected to have non-military utility in the fields of augmented reality, earth resource exploration, telemedicine, air traffic control, homeland security, and any other area where ad-hoc portable clusters will improve quality, productivity, or accelerate discovery. The fully functional prototype is scheduled for delivery in March 2009 and production quantities will be available in June 2009. Pricing will be announced in February 2009.