Jan 18 2013
Mercury Systems, Inc., a best-of-breed provider of commercially developed, open sensor and Big Data processing systems for critical commercial, defense and intelligence applications, has expanded its product line to offer the industry's first embedded processing module using the powerful Intel® 3rd generation Core™ i7 quad-core Ivy Bridge mobile-class processor and dual Mellanox® ConnectX®-3 host adapters for a total of four InfiniBand™ fabric connections.
The new LDS6523 (low-density server) is an industry model for open architecture high-performance embedded computing solutions, offering unparalleled data plane bandwidth with four 40Gbps fabric ports. The product can be configured to support Double Data Rate, Quad Data Rate and 40 GigE speeds. Solutions based on the LDS6523 are perfectly suited for multi-dimensional applications requiring high throughput, determinism and low latency — such as CyberINT, IMINT, SIGINT and radar.
The LDS6523 is powered by the i7 quad-core processor running at 2.3 GHz. The processor utilizes Intel's revolutionary Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction set, which doubles the width of its SIMD engine and greatly increases floating-point processing performance. The ConnectX-3 device serves as a bridge between PCI Express® 3.0 interfaces on the processor and the OpenVPX™ data plane, and offers configurable speed settings that can scale the data plane bandwidth. To balance higher processing density, the data plane bandwidth scales on the LDS6523 architecture to ensure that the processor is fully utilized and never starved for more data.
The LDS6523 provides two mezzanine sites for configuration with standard I/O cards — one PMC/XMC site and one XMC site. The PCI Express architecture brings a PCIe® interface to both XMC sites and to the PMC, thus maximizing the flow of I/O into the processing subsystem. The LDS6523 enables mission security features and offers multiple I/O options and advanced system management in a VITA 65/46/48 (VPX-REDI) compliant form factor.
"With the variety of industry choices for I/O and fabric communications, using commercially available silicon such as InfiniBand is often the right path to take," said Leon Woo, Vice President of Mercury Engineering. "And by leveraging disparate commercial technologies and exploiting them using our open, subsystem-level framework in software, hardware and packaging, we can offer unique high performance solutions — and bring them to market rapidly."
"Mercury is a recognized leader in developing highly advanced embedded computing solutions," said Marc Sultzbaugh, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Mellanox Technologies. "Utilizing Mellanox's ConnectX-3, Mercury's LDS6523 embedded processing module provides end customers running critical commercial, defense and intelligence applications with industry-leading low-latency and high-bandwidth performance."
With over 30 years of multicomputer software expertise, including advanced multicore processor expertise, Mercury Systems is committed to maintaining an open software environment. This strategy is fully applied to the LDS6523 module. In fact, the same Linux® development and run-time environments implemented on the LDS6523 module are also implemented on Mercury's other Intel-based product platforms. Mercury also supports open software and middleware standards, including OFED and MPI.