Rack-mount digital-signal processors for ground and air radar

Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing in Leesburg, Va., is offering the PowerMatrix family of high-performance/high-density multiprocessor rack-mount computer systems for radar, sonar, signals intelligence, and mobile applications. These 8- and 21-slot digital signal processing (DSP) systems deliver as much performance as 480 billion floating-point operations per second (giga-FLOPS) in versions that support from 10 to 48 processors. The PowerMatrix-48 DSP, a 21-slot rack-mount system supports as many as 48 PowerPC 1.25 GHz processors and delivers as much as 480 giga-FLOPS peak performance. The PowerMatrix-10 SMP, an 8-slot rack-mount system supports as many as 20 PowerPC 1.0 GHz processors for peak performance as much as 160 giga-FLOPS. PowerMatrix systems have spare VME slots and PMC sites to build custom configurations for applications such as radar, sonar, and signals intelligence that require massive processing coupled with broad I/O support. PowerMatrix systems come with independent node architecture boards running VxWorks real-time software and symmetrical processing (SMP) architecture boards running Linux. The PowerMatrix systems can be customized. Examples of I/O options include Serial FPDP, Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, ARINC 429, and digital receivers. The PowerMatrix-20 SMP comes in an 8-slot, 19-inch chassis. It supports five-quad PowerPC Manta QX3 single-board computers, one PSTN StarFabric PMC, and one PGR8 Gigabit Ethernet Switch PMC. It uses onboard StarFabric bridges and the PSTN PMC card to deliver 600 megabytes per second aggregate distributed switch throughput. The Gigabit Ethernet switch card connects all of the Manta QX3 cards to the Gigabit Ethernet backplane. This compact system is for the medium-level processing typically required by ground-mobile and fast-jet radar applications. Software support for the PowerMatrix-48 DSP and PowerMatrix-20 SMP includes Linux 2.6, VxWorks 5.5 or 6.2, Global Buffer Manager, Curtiss-Wright’s IPC InterProcessor Communications, and SSSL signal processing library. For more information contact Curtiss-Wright online at www.cwcembedded.com.