INDUSTRY

Mercury's GPU-based ISR subsystem and scalable MicroTCA chassis are lauded by Military Embedded Systems magazine as enablers of faster deployment

Mercury has been recognized with two Editor's Choice Awards for market-leading, standards-based solutions to complex embedded challenges that exponentially simplify and speed development. The awards from Military Embedded Systems magazine focus on the latest examples in Mercury's history of innovations for embedded computing.

The first award, announced in June 2010, was for Mercury's Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-based, OpenVPX ISR subsystems. These powerful subsystems are designed uniquely to heighten the war-fighters' situational awareness through speedy and precise delivery of actionable information through improved processing, exploitation, and dissemination (PED) capabilities. These capabilities enable sensors to be smarter, to accept unrelenting streams of data, and to extract and deliver situational awareness and other crucial information to war-fighters, empowering them to decide and react.

"Wouldn't life be easier if engineers could just put an entire already-made subsystem into their design and move on, exponentially speeding development time and ease? Sounds too good to be true, but that's precisely what Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. is offering in the form of its OpenVPX (VITA 65)-based ISR subsystem," wrote the editors of the magazine. Chris Ciufo, OpenSystems Media, Group Editorial Director, Military and Aerospace Group said: "Mercury's systems expertise in high-performance COTS-based processing is second to none." The subsystem, already deployed in an unnamed rugged platform, is crafted to execute Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (PED) within the ISR realm.

The heterogeneous ISR subsystems are powered by the GPU technology in the Ensemble 6000 Series 6U OpenVPX GSC6200 GPU Processing Module. The GSC6200 module supports up to two high-end nVIDIA or ATI GPU compute nodes per 6U slot; all GPUs in each module version are embedded in the MxM form factor, a standard form factor that supports rapid technical insertion of the latest GPU architectures.

Also recognized by Military Embedded Systems magazine was the Ensemble2000 Series 6-Slot MicroTCA Chassis, a key building block for small form factor, low-cost, high-performance solutions. The 1U chassis supports six AMC bays, providing telecommunications and embedded computing applications developers with a cost-effective, easy- to-use, and flexible entry-level platform that scales into multi-chassis MicroTCA system configurations.

Multi-chassis scalability is built into the design, which supports mechanical stacking in a 19-inch rack, simplifying physical arrangements. More significantly, the base interface, fabric interface, and clock all can be daisy-chained among multiple chassis, creating larger configurations and making a wider range of AMCs available for a given application. Fabric choices include RapidIO, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and PCI Express. For further economy, switches are built into the chassis backplane to support both the fabric and base interfaces.

"Mercury has a long heritage of driving innovation, performance and scalability for the high performance embedded computing market," added Mr. Ciufo. "Both the GPU-based OpenVPX ISR Subsystem and the Ensemble 2000 Series 6-Slot MicroTCA Chassis demonstrate the company's depth of expertise and underscore its commitment to driving technology development for next generation systems."