Software tools to bring RapidIO to open-systems digital signal processing introduced by Curtiss-Wright

ASHBURN, Va., 30 June 2012. Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions in Ashburn, Va., is introducing a commercially available port of Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) for the Serial RapidIO high-speed switch fabric for open-systems military embedded computing applications.

The OFED stack, which results from work done the Curtiss-Wright High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) Center of Excellence to migrate HPEC technology to open-systems architecture aerospace and defense applications, company officials say. The OFED stack supports the Curtiss-Wright CHAMP-AV8 (VPX6-462) digital signal processing (DSP) engine (story continues below).

The OFED stack includes support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and enables commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) military embedded systems designers to build extremely high performance, scalable HPEC systems using open software and Serial RapidIO for OpenVPX high performance systems using the Intel Core i7 microprocessor in demanding signal-, image-, and radar processing applications.

OFED was developed and is maintained by Open Fabrics Alliance. It 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.

The OFED stack enables applications written for Ethernet and Infiniband to run on Curtiss-Wright's RapidIO-based HPEC platform. Curtiss-Wright announced in May that its HPEC Center of Excellence had incorporated the open-source CORBA middleware stack, ACE, TAO, CIAO, and DAnCE, into its HPEC embedded computers.

The OFED Stack is based on commercial RapidIO silicon, and was developed using Fedora 15 with 64-bit support. For more information contact Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions online at www.cwcdefense.com

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