Brochure

Radar
One of the biggest challenges for today’s
radar systems is to provide more capa-
bility—range, number of targets, speed,
etc. —while meeting ever more stringent
SWaP constraints. The extra speed offered
by the GPGPU platforms translates directly
to more area coverage and more security
for the operating team.
One rack containing 72 conventional
processors (18 6U boards) and producing a
peak capability of 576 GFLOPS can take up
4 cubic feet, weigh over 105 pounds and
consume over 2000 watts. GPGPU tech-
nology can allow system designers
to fit an unprecedented amount
of processing power into a
very compact package.
The use of three 3U VPX
boards can yield peak
processing power of
766 GFLOPS in less
than 0.4 cubic feet.
Rugged GPGPU COTS Boards
for Military and Aerospace
Development Ease
Increases in performance will be obtained in
application areas such as Software Defined
Radio, sonar, and medical imaging. But what
is less obvious is the change in development
strategy offered by GPGPU technology. The
only other technology currently offering
massively parallel processing capability is
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
Although FPGAs provide very high-
performance data processing, developing
high-performance FPGA cores requires a
very specialized skill set built on a hardware
engineering background, whereas devel-
oping code for GPGPU processors is much
more of a software issue. For companies
with a background in multi-processor GPP/
DSP-based system architecture, the move
to GPGPU will be much less disruptive than
a move to FPGA processors. The processing
power, system size and power consumption
are compelling factors, but the addition of
programming ease makes such a system
tough to match.
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