Product category:
VMEbus Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Mercury Computer Systems | Subject: PowerStream 6600
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 07 September 2006
System processes 3D radar in real time
Multicomputer boasts 716 PowerPC GFLOPS of compute performance in a conduction-cooled enclosure, to enable powerful sensor computing on the move.
Mercury Computer Systems has announced the breakthrough PowerStream 6600 multicomputer, with 716 PowerPC GFLOPS of compute performance in a conduction-cooled enclosure, to enable powerful sensor computing on the move The performance density and rugged mechanical design of the PowerStream 6600 enables manned and unmanned vehicles to support C4ISR (command, control, communication, computers, information, surveillance and reconnaissance) multimode missions
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 30 May 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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These include radar, and image and signals intelligence (sigint) processing.
"The PowerStream 6600 contains the enabling hardware and software building blocks necessary for mission systems to perform compute-intensive tasks, such as processing a 3D radar data cube, in real time", said Eran Strod, Director of Product Marketing for the Defense business at Mercury.
The PowerStream 6600 has the processing capacity to enable advanced radar applications including multi-mode search, multi-target tracking, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, and space-time adaptive processing (STAP).
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Additionally, multimode sensor signal processing may be supported for cross-cueing of sigint detections with SAR or other imagery sensors aboard a mobile platform.
The 16-slot PowerStream 6600 is a complete system computing solution with data acquisition, high-speed I/O, PowerPC compute clusters, and FPGA processing integrated with open-standard software.
From the inside out, the PowerStream 6600 is built using open and de facto standards: the Linux and VxWorks operating systems, Internet Protocol (IP), VPX-REDI (VITA 46 and 48), PMC-X/XMC, Ethernet, and the RapidIO interconnect fabric.
The PowerStream 6600 is aligned with open standards initiatives such as the Navy's Open Architecture Computing Environment (OACE).
The PowerStream 6600 supports 34Gbyte/s of sustained RapidIO fabric throughput without requiring slots dedicated to fabric switching.
Maximally configured, it can support either 64 processors or 21 FPGAs.
The following modules will be available with first customer shipment: a quad 1.4GHz MPC7448 high-compute-density (HCD) card; an FPGA compute node (FCN) board featuring three user-programmable Virtex-4 processors; and a dual MPC8548 smart carrier board supporting dual PMC-X or XMC mezzanine I/O cards.
The PowerStream 6600 provides a path forward for Mercury's classic MCOE software environment, as well as significant enhancements.
The platform software supports the internet protocol (IP), allowing processors to be deployed as a network cluster running standard networking applications.
This network-enabled software architecture will greatly ease the challenge facing developers who must support multi-mission computing and connect next-generation sensors to the global information grid (GIG).
Applications will also benefit from having a wide range of data movement middleware options, including TCP/IP, CORBA, MPI, DRI and PAS, all optimised to run over the RapidIO backplane fabric.
With the addition of the PowerStream 6600, Mercury now has the most comprehensive set of RapidIO- and PowerPC-based computers of any vendor in the COTS industry, with form factor support for VXS (VITA 41), AdvancedTCA, CompactPCI, MultiPort, and now, VPX-REDI.
PowerStream 6600 is scheduled to ship to customers in Q4 2006.
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