Leesburg, VA – March 30, 2009 — Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, a leading designer and manufacturer of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) VME, VPX, VXS and CompactPCI products for the aerospace and defense market, announced that it has added a powerful new multiprocessor debugger feature to Continuum Insights 3.0, its popular suite of GUI-based System Monitoring, Event Analysis, and System Management software tools for developers of embedded multicomputer systems application software. Continuum Insights is the industry’s first development tool suite to offer a multiprocessor debugger, an essential tool for system integrators developing large multiprocessor systems. The new debugger tool speeds and simplifies the development of embedded multiprocessor systems for demanding digital signal processing (DSP) applications such as solid-state, synthetic aperture radar, and signals intelligence (SIGINT).
“With the addition of its new Debugger tool, Continuum Insights continues to uniquely and powerfully meet the specific needs of multiprocessor system developers,” said Lynn Patterson, vice president and general manager of Modular Solutions, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. “As our customers increasingly build applications based on multiple processors and cores, Continuum Insights becomes an essential tool, setting new standards for addressing the complexity of multiprocessor applications by delivering a powerful suite of graphical user interface (GUI) software that optimizes development productivity while maximizing total multicomputer system performance.”
The Continuum Insights Debugger tool enables a user to set a single breakpoint on an individual processor and to use this breakpoint to halt selected processors within the system at the same time. This makes it possible to examine the state of the entire multi-processor system at the time of interest, followed by traditional single-step analysis to debug the problem.
Until recently most of the management and debugging tools for multiprocessing environments were limited in their ability to resolve the complex, interactive and time-critical problems of such systems. Curtiss-Wright Controls’ Continuum Insights 3.0, based on the Eclipse development and application framework, innovatively provides developers of multiprocessor-based computer systems with the information they need to accurately tune their systems and speed their time-to-market. As system designers increasingly migrate to multicore processors on single board computers (SBC) and DSP engines they need innovative tools that are optimized for multiprocessor architectures. Continuum Insights improves the development environment for multicore SBC and DSP engine systems using Curtiss-Wright Controls boards and Wind River Workbench, an Eclipse-based integrated tools suite. Continuum Insights expands upon the Wind River System Viewer tool for event analysis in multiprocessor systems, enabling the analysis of multiple multicore processors, both on a single board and across multiple boards.
Continuum Insights goes beyond the limitations of single-processor data capture, enabling system developers to make time-aligned comparisons of the effect of events occurring on multiple processors, significantly reducing the time required to debug their systems. It captures the race conditions, or interaction between multiple processors, easing and speeding the identification and correction of events that occur in the wrong sequence.
In addition to the Debugger, Insights also provides System Monitoring Tools that provide a graphical view of the system and many operational information and statistics, an Event Analysis tool that captures “events” on all the processors and displays them in time correlated fashion to help a user debug temporal problems, and a System Management tool to facilitate loading of executables into a large system of processors and store them into the processors’ Flash memory.
Continuum Insights Features:
System Management Tool
This tool provides a means for managing the system across all processors and cores or a user-defined subset of processors and cores. It provides the ability to initialize and launch the multicomputer with a collected set of predefined kernels and/or executables. In addition, the tool provides the ability to manage flash in terms of uploading, downloading, and deletion of files on an individual card level or at the system level.
• Supports a consolidated Telnet console function to easily manage multiple nodes in a system
• Manages initialization and execution of all processors in a system through logical groups
• Manages board-level, nonvolatile Flash memory at the system level including viewing, storing, deleting files and environment variables, as well as upgrading board-level firmware
• Configures Wind River VxWorks boot parameters for all boards in the system easily from a simple, intuitive GUI display.
Event Analysis Tool
The Continuum Insights Event Analysis tool collects and displays operating system-level events, driver-level events, and user-defined events across multiple processors within a system, all accurately time-aligned using a common time base. Because the event data is collected in real-time, Continuum Insights enables developers to debug and verify critical interactions between tasks among multiple processors and cores.
• Uses a common time base for accurate synchronization of event data across all processors
• Supports ability to insert user-defined events around application code to fine-tune the application and debug processor interactions
• Scales to systems consisting of a few to hundreds of processing nodes
System Monitoring Tool
The System Monitoring tool provides a hierarchical, graphical representation of a multicomputer system. System and health information are updated in real-time, providing displays of processing threads, utilization, task allocations, and processor-level and system-level configuration information.
• Provides system-level information such as card counts, types, and slot information
• Provides processor/core information such as processor utilization, memory usage statistics, and running tasks.
Easily monitors card level and system failures
Continuum Insights furthers Curtiss-Wright Controls’ COTS Continuum product architecture by harnessing the advantages of complementary Continuum products such as Continuum Firmware & BSP, Continuum Vector, and Continuum IPC. For more information, visit the Continuum Insights web page here.
Continuum Insights 3.0 is supported on Curtiss-Wright Controls’ new VPX/VPX-REDI-based single board computers and DSP and FPGA engines, including the CHAMP-AV6, the VPX6-185,and CHAMP-FX2 products. Future releases of Continuum Insights will offer additional system tools and support a wider range of COTS Continuum-based SBCs and DSP engines.
About COTS Continuum
COTS Continuum is Curtiss-Wright Controls’ new product architecture designed to make customers more productive and able to leverage new technologies more quickly and with less risk. The COTS Continuum architecture includes a common software, hardware, and mechanical architecture for future Curtiss-Wright products. It standardizes I/O routing and pin-outs, electrical interfaces, and APIs to all hardware functionality, and provides a common HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and common user documentation across product lines. The net result is a common out-of-box experience between product families and next-generation products that benefits all users by easing their technology insertions.
Sales Inquiries
Please forward all sales and reader service inquiries to Jerri-Lynne Charbonneau, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, 613-254-5112 (phone); 613-599-7777 (fax); [email protected].
For editorial information regarding Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing products or services, contact John Wranovics, Director of Media Relations, Curtiss-Wright, 925-640-6402; [email protected].
Pricing for Continuum Insights is based on each project per site. There are no run-time royalties, and no per developer seat charges.
About Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing is the industry’s most comprehensive and experienced single source for embedded solutions, ranging from Processing, Subsystems, Data Communication, DSP, and Video & Graphics to the most advanced board level components and fully integrated custom systems. The Embedded Computing group serves the defense, aerospace, commercial and industrial markets and is part of Curtiss-Wright Controls Inc. For more information about Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing visit www.cwcembedded.com.
About Curtiss-Wright Controls, Inc.
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Curtiss-Wright Controls is the motion control segment of Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW). With manufacturing facilities around the world, Curtiss-Wright Controls is a leading technology-based organization providing niche motion control products, subsystems and services internationally for the aerospace and defense markets. For more information, visit www.cwcontrols.com.