CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., 19 2009 GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, a unit of GE Enterprise Solutions, today announced the OpenVPX-compatible GRA111 high performance graphics board.
The GRA111 is the first member of GE Fanuc's planned family of NVIDIA CUDA-enabled products that will bring a 'supercomputing' capability to applications and environments such as radar, signals intelligence, and video surveillance and interpretation.
"The enormous potential of the GPGPU – the general purpose graphics processing unit – with its massively parallel computing architecture is just beginning to become apparent to developers in the military and aerospace field," says Rob McKeel, vice president, Embedded Systems at GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms. "What we are announcing today is an exciting first: a new compact, lightweight platform that can deliver exceptional levels of computing performance in demanding applications and challenging environments."
NVIDIA's CUDA is a general purpose parallel computing architecture that takes advantage of the parallel compute engine in NVIDIA GPUs to solve many computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a general purpose CPU, GE officials say. It includes the CUDA Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and the parallel compute engine of the GPU.
GE officials say a major prime contractor in the military/aerospace industry has evaluated the CUDA architecture in a radar system, and found that performance improvement of 15x is achievable with minimal reprogramming effort.
The 3U format GRA111 derives much of its performance from the 96 cores, 128-bit memory interface, 1 GByte of DDR3 video memory, 16-lane PCI Express Gen 2 interface, 540MHz graphics clock and 1,302MHz processor clock of the NVIDIA GT 240 GPU.
Optionally available as an LRM (Line Replaceable Module) in accordance with the VPX-REDI (VITA 48) standard and with a set of I/O, the advanced capabilities of the GRA111 can also be applied to many graphics and video applications. Dual, independent channels mean that it is capable of driving RGB analog component video, digital DVI 1.0, and HDMI standards. In addition, the GRA111's video input capability allows integration of sensor data using RS170, NTSC or PAL video formats.
More information go to www.gefanuc.com/gpgpu
