3U VPX rugged graphics board with NVIDIA CUDA GPGPU for military embedded systems introduced by GE
Editor's note: GE Intelligent Platforms changed its name to Abaco Systems on 23 Nov. 2015 as a result of the company's acquisition last September by New York-based private equity firm Veritas Capital.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., 16 May 2012. GE Intelligent Platforms in Huntsville, Ala., is introducing the GRA112 3U VPX rugged graphics board for demanding graphical applications that require a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU), such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), radar, and sonar.
The GRA112 is a rugged solution that stands up to extremes of shock, vibration, temperature, and contaminants. It is appropriate for applications that are SWaP-constrained such as unmanned vehicles.
The GRA112 features a 384-core NVIDIA Kepler architecture-based EXK107 GPU, as well as 2 gigabytes of GDDR5 memory. GE engineers designed the embedded computing card as a technology-insertion upgrade to the company's GRA111 graphics board for military embedded systems.
The GRA112 features the latest PCI Express Gen 3 interconnect. GE's GPUDirect Peer-to-Peer technology allows data to stream onto the GPU, resulting in a 25x or more decrease in transfer latency from sensors to GPUs. This frees CPU resources and memory and enables GPUs to run time-sensitive applications such as electronic warfare.
The NVIDIA EXK107 GPU features the company's CUDA parallel computing architecture. The 384-core GPU can run as fast as 622 billion floating point operations per second (gigaFLOPS), 64 gigabytes per second internal memory bandwidth, and 16 gigabytes per second external PCI Express bandwidth.
Kepler is the latest generation of GPU technology from graphics specialist NVIDIA in Santa Clara, Calif. Availability of the pin-compatible GRA112 also provides a technology insertion upgrade path for users of the MAGIC1 rugged display computer.
For radar processing, double-precision floating point hardware mitigates the influence of artifacts introduced by single-precision processing. For video processing, the GRA112's aids video stitching and sensor fusion in wide-area surveillance applications that use data from several sensor types.
The GRA112 offers dual independent channels for driving RGB analog component video, digital DVI 1.0, and HDMI. In addition, the GRA112's video input capability allows integration of sensor data using RS170, NTSC or PAL video formats.
For more information contact GE Intelligent Platforms online at www.ge-ip.com, or NVIDIA at www.nvidia.com
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John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
