SCIENCE

Mercury Computer Systems has announced the availability of OpenSAL, an open source version of its award-winning Scientific Algorithm Library (SAL) for vector math acceleration. SAL is a high-throughput, low-latency signal processing library containing efficient algorithms with the fewest possible instructions and computing resources. OpenSAL provides a robust API, C code reference design and documentation for over 400 SAL math functions.

"The introduction of OpenSAL is another example of Mercury's unrelenting focus to bring performance migration to open systems architectures," stated Dr. Ian Dunn, chief technology officer at Mercury Computer Systems. "We believe that the proliferation of OpenSAL and other open source initiatives such as Open Component Portability Infrastructure (OpenCPI), an open middleware solution that simplifies programming of heterogeneous processing environments such as FPGAs and DSPs, will allow the community to expand its capabilities to benefit the HPEC and academic communities. We envision a large community using OpenSAL and working together to augment it over time," Dunn added.

The release of OpenSAL further underscores Mercury's strategic commitment to industry standards, open architecture, and open systems solutions. An earlier example of this commitment is the OpenVPX specification effort led by Mercury to enable interoperability for VPX systems, ratified by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in June 2010. Like OpenVPX, the introduction of OpenSAL is also a response to customer and Department of Defense (DoD) requirements to migrate towards open architectures and systems for portability, reducing time to theater, lowering cost, while leveraging higher technology readiness levels (TRLs). OpenSAL is an initial step towards enabling the user community to add the values of open architecture to today's ever expanding compute engines.

Mercury's SAL is a de facto industry standard, with thousands of production installations in highly compute intensive, real-time applications such as radar, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence. SAL, MultiCore SAL, VSIPL, and MultiCore VSIPL are components of Mercury's MultiCore Plus Software Environment, open, flexible, and optimized libraries for real-time programming. Various accelerated versions of OpenSAL for PowerPC processors, and Intel processors, as well as GPUs are available from Mercury under commercial license, and also through engagement with Mercury's Services and Systems Integration team.