Kontron HPEC 18-blade platform

An embedded computing platform designed for military-aerospace applications will use an integrated platform that supplies power in a small footprint.

Meeting the needs of computer-intensive DSP-based systems, the Kontron HPEC platform is a VPX-based super computer-like system that accommodates up to 18 6U VPX VX6060s, powered by dual Core i7 processor computing nodes and employs 36 tightly coupled processors.

Using a VXFabric approach, which is a simplified API the company developed to help accelerate the design process, this latest platform allows high-speed socket-based communication between blades by using multiple switched fabric interconnects within the backplane.

The 72-core, 18-blade platform provides up to 1.44 Teraflops (1.44 trillion floating point operation per second) in a small 19″ footprint.

Potential applications include radar, sonar, SIGINT and video processing for various aircraft or UAV programs.

The independent data interconnects enable significant modularity, scalability and flexibility improvements using gigabit ethernet as the control plane and a combination of PCI Express and 10 gigabit ethernet as the data plane.

This enables aggregate system throughput up to 540 Gbps with low latency. Plus, application software development and time to deployment is accelerated by the VXFabric API that simplifies high-speed communication between blades.

The platform has performance per power ratio (one Gflop/W). Offering a low-risk, fully compliant technical solution, the major components include: processor boards, dual 10GbE mezzanine cards, PCIe switches (VX3905), GigE switch cards and PMC/XMC carrier boards, all within the 8U 19″ VPX chassis.

The platform features two dual-core Intel Core i7 processors onboard that operate at 2 GHz clock rate or greater. Each VPX processor board is configured with 8 GB DDR3 memory that is allocated across four memory channels with a 2 GB per processor core. The VPX processor boards also support one XMC site with maximum throughput of 8 Gbps.