Curtiss-Wright Controls introduces first Nvidia GPGPU OpenVPX engine
Posted by Courtney E. Howard
ASHBURN, Va., 4 July 2011. Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing (CWCEC), a business group of Curtiss-Wright Controls and a designer and manufacturer of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) VME, VPX, OpenVPX, and CompactPCI products for the rugged aerospace and defense applications, has introduced the VPX6-490 GPU Application Accelerator, its first general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), multi-core engine.
The VPX6-490 features dual Nvidia GPUs, each with 240 CUDA cores and based on the Nvidia Fermi architecture. Integrated into a high-performance embedded computing (HPEC) subsystem, VPX6-490 is designed to function as a co-processor attached to a host Intel-processor board. It takes advantage of the PCIe Expansion Plane definitions in the VITA 65 OpenVPX standard to provide off-the-shelf backplane support for high-speed interconnection between pairs of SBC/GPU.
The new offering combines 2nd Generation Intel processors, Gen2 PCI Express interconnect, and 480 NVIDIA CUDA for demanding military digital signal processing(DSP) applications, such as C4ISR, EO/IR, and SatCom.
"The VPX6-490 uniquely brings Nvidia’s new 240 core graphics processors to the rugged deployed environment, providing system integrators with the highest-performance GPGPU embedded building blocks available," says Lynn Bamford, vice president and general manager of Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing.
"Rugged open-architecture processing modules, like Curtiss-Wright's VPX-490, will enable military system designers to leverage the massively parallel performance of our newest GPUs," says Taner Ozcelik, general manager, embedded and automotive business, Nvidia.
The VPX6-490 takes advantage of GPUs based on the Nvidia Fermi architecture and provides dual high-performance GPU processors with a 2 gigabyte, 256-bit wide, 80 Gbyte/s GDDR5 memory subsystem designed to eliminate data bottlenecks and support large signal processing datasets into the onboard memory. Each GPU device supports a full 16-lane Gen2 PCIe interface to the backplane. The VPX6-490 also supports 8-lane and 4-lane PCIe interfaces.
The VPX6-490 is designed to work with Intel processor- based SBCs, such as the Curtiss-Wright VPX6-1956 2nd Generation Intel Core i7 and the CHAMP-AV8 dual 2nd Generation Intel Core i7 multi-processor card.