OCTOBER 1--Mercury Computer Systems Inc. (Chelmsford, MA;www.mc.com) is now offering its RACE++ Series VantageRT HCD (high compute density) system that provides the embedded computing industry with a powerful and scalable PCI-based platform for digital-signal and image processing. Scaling up to 256 GFLOPS, VantageRT HCD systems double the processing power previously available in a PCI-based system. Originally designed for medical-imaging applications, VantageRT systems now meet application requirements of additional markets including semiconductor wafer inspection, ground-based radar, and image exploitation.
The new system extends Mercury's PCI-based VantageRT product family, increasing compute density by combining the RACE++ interconnect architecture with four Motorola 500-MHz PowerPC 7410 microprocessors on each PCI module. The VantageRT HCD system scales up to 64 G4 processors working together in an industrial PC chassis delivering up to 256 billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS) of processing power. The VantageRT HCD offers the most processing power currently available on the market for a PCI system. The full scalability of the VantageRT HCD system is enabled by the RACE++ switch fabric. Each processor gets a connection to the RACE++ interconnect, which provides multiple, concurrent communications between processors. Each module has three over-the-top RACE++ ports, maintaining the balance between processing power and interprocessor communication bandwidth - a hallmark of all RACE++ systems.
The VantageRT HCD compute nodes are identical to those used in Mercury's VME and CompactPCI systems, so they run the same real-time software. It is supported by Mercury's real-time software environment, including an integrated development environment, multiprocessor communications libraries, and algorithm libraries optimized for the AltiVec vector-processing engine.
The VantageRT product family meets the needs of applications requiring the power of a RACE-based multiprocessor system without the rugged environmental constraints where VME-based solutions are usually deployed. VantageRT products are used in a number of commercial applications including medical imaging, digital television, and industrial inspection. VantageRT systems are also used in protected environments in defense applications such as simulations and ground stations.
