Mil Tech Trends RUGGED COMPUTING
VPX in highperformance embedded computing By Thierry Wastiaux Taking advantage of the latest technologies deployed in the commercial high-performance embedded computing environments allow designers to build OpenVPX systems that pack the impressive computing power of tens of GFLOPS while meeting the space and weight limits required in the embedded military and aerospace fields. Concepts developed in the supercomputing field can be extremely useful in the military domain, particularly in high-end signal intelligence (SIGINT), radar, and electronic warfare applications. Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense PEO IEW&S.
In the science field, high-performance massively parallel computing is used in computationally intensive applications such quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, molecular dynamic simulations, aircraft and spacecraft aerodynamics and other physical simulations. The concepts developed in the supercomputing field can be extremely useful in the military domain where it is highly strategic to pack more computing power into smaller sizes. This is particularly true in high-end signal intelligence (SIGINT), radar, electronic warfare (EW), search, and track applications that have very demanding computing requirements. In high-performance embedded computing systems (HPEC), the speed and the flexibility of the interconnect has become a key factor. The VITA 65 OpenVPX standard clearly appears to be the best standard to bring this connectivity while also enabling maximum processing power in small form factor parallel computing architectures.
26 July/August 2015
Bringing the best from the supercomputing world and adapting it to the military and aerospace domain is clearly a challenge. Processors and FPGAs for HPEC The choice of the best possible processors and FPGAs to design powerful DSP boards is the first key element on the road to powerful HPEC architectures. These boards have to propose the best ratios in terms of number of operations per second and per watt. The last generations of Intel Core I7 and Xeon DE processors offer an excellent balance between processing power and energy consumption. Moreover FPGAs are known for offering the best ratio of GOPS/W. On integer operations and for parallel computing, they can run ten times faster than a processor which is extremely useful in image processing or signal processing applications. The Xilinx 7 series of Xilinx is one of the best FPGAs for these functions. In terms of communication capabilities, Intel Core I7 processors feature many native PCI Express (PCIe) links offering tremendous data connectivity. Additionally, Intel Xeon DE processors have integrated 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGAs feature smartly designed transceivers reaching a data rate per lane of as much as 13 Gb/s with an aggregate bidirectional transceiver bandwidth of as high as 2.7 Tb/s. Tightly coupling processors to FPGAs enable the design of very dense and powerful processing boards that are the foundation of HPEC systems. Small and distributed HPEC systems Enabling supercomputing in an embedded system depends on the size of the targeted computing system. The interconnect of these systems has to be robust,
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