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| Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions announces first commercially available OFED Port for Defense & Aerospace HPEC Systems |
ASHBURN, VA – Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions, a business unit of Curtiss-Wright Controls, has announced that its HPEC (High Performance Embedded Computing) Center of Excellence has met a significant milestone in the migration of commercial HPC (High Performance Computing) technology to the COTS open architecture system market with the debut of its first commercially available port of OFED™ (Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution) for RapidIO™. CWCDS’s OFED stack includes support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). The introduction of this new OFED stack for Serial RapidIO (SRIO) enables COTS embedded military system designers to, for the first time, build extremely high performance, scalable HPEC systems using open software and SRIO, the COTS market’s preferred switched serial fabric for architecting OpenVPX™ high performance systems in Intel® Core™i7-based platforms. This advance helps ease, speed and lower the cost of developing HPEC systems to address the most demanding C4ISR signal, image and radar processing applications. The release of CWCDS’s RDMA version of OFED for SRIO further establishes CWCDS’ leadership role in bringing open architecture HPC ecosystem technology to the military HPEC market.
The OFED stack for Serial RapidIO supports CWCDS’s CHAMP-AV8 (VPX6-462) Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engine. OFED, developed and maintained by Open Fabrics Alliance, is open-source software for RDMA and kernel bypass applications. RDMA enables large numbers of Linux processing elements to share data while minimizing CPU overhead and maximizing fabric throughput. It is widely used today in commercial HPC systems for breakthrough applications that require high efficiency computing, low latencies and high bandwidth utilization. The OFED stack allows applications written for Ethernet and Infiniband™ platforms to run on Curtiss-Wright’s RapidIO-based HPEC platform.
“OFED brings open architecture software to VPX system fabrics, an area that has traditionally been used to lock-in system integrators,” said Lynn Bamford, senior vice president and general manager of Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions. “Open source software components like OFED will significantly lower software development and support costs for defense prime contractors.”
This milestone follows CWCDS’ recent announcement on May 23, 2012, that its HPEC Center of Excellence had incorporated the open-source CORBA middleware stack, ACE, TAO, CIAO and DAnCE, into its industry-leading HPEC computing platform, a first for the embedded defense and aerospace COTS market
Unlike alternatives, which are based on niche, proprietary silicon, the new OFED Stack from CWCDS is the embedded COTS market’s only port of OFED for SRIO that is based on market-driven, commercial RapidIO silicon. It was developed using Fedora 15 with 64-bit support. CWCDS also earlier announced that it is making OFED part of its HPEC offering for Linux.
OFED Support for Serial RapidIO (SRIO)
Serial RapidIO is not supported by the open source OFED package. Curtiss-Wright’s OFED implementation provides an OFED device driver for SRIO on Intel® Core™i7 Intel processors with IDT’s Tsi721 PCIe2-to-SRIO2 RapidIO bridge. This driver can be easily integrated into the open source OFED environment. This layer emulates an Infiniband device on top of Serial RapidIO to provide the necessary mappings needed for the RDMA services. As a result, standard applications such as MPI that access RDMA services using verbs (APIs) will work transparently and efficiently on SRIO hardware.
These components were tested on CWCDS’ CHAMP-AV8 dual 2nd Generation Core® i7-based multiprocessor OpenVPX board and will be added to CWCDS’ Linux HPEC certification software suite.
Curtiss-Wright Continuum HPEC Platform Components
Continuum HPEC systems consist of a large number of distributed processors, IO, and software stacks connected by a low latency system fabric. HPEC capabilities are developed in CWCDS’ Ashburn, VA, HPEC Center of Excellence. With scalable architectures, dataflow modeling and configuration validation, Curtiss-Wright’s Continuum HPEC customers can source embedded HPC platforms that integrate Intel®-based multi-processor boards with AVX, GPGPU co-processors, Xilinx® Virtex® 6 FPGAs, Serial RapidIO (SRIO) and Ethernet switching with Open Standard software solutions including VxWorks®, and Linux with OpenMPI and OFED software interfaces. Supported products include Curtiss-Wright’s CHAMP-FX3 Virtex6 FPGA board, the CHAMP-AV8, the VPX6-1956 2nd Generation Core i7 SBC, the VPX6-6902 SRIO/Ethernet switch, and the VPX6-490 GPGPU module. Many OpenVPX™ enclosures are supported including a small 5-6 slot and 19” rack 16-slot air-cooled Chassis.
For more information on CWCDS HPEC products, please visit: www.curtisswrightds.com/products/subsystems/pro[…]
About Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions
Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions (CWCDS) is a long established technology leader in the development of rugged electronic modules and systems for defense applications. CWCDS serves as a technology and integration partner to its customers, providing a full range of advanced, highly engineered solutions from modular open systems approaches to fully custom optimized solutions. Our unmatched capabilities and product breadth span from industry standard based COTS modules to complete electronic subsystems. The company’s modules and systems are currently deployed in a wide range of demanding defense & aerospace applications including C4ISR systems, unmanned subsystems, mission computing, fire control, turret stabilization, and recording & storage solutions. Additionally, the company’s broad engineering capabilities combine systems, software, electrical, and mechanical design expertise with comprehensive program management and a broad range of life-cycle support services. For more information, please visit www.curtisswrightds.com
About Curtiss-Wright Controls, Inc.
Headquartered in Charlotte, NC, Curtiss-Wright Controls is the Motion Control segment of Curtiss-Wright Corporation. 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.