GE Intelligent Platforms has unveiled IPN250 Rugged 6U OpenVPX Single Board Computer (SBC) that features an integrated GPGPU (general purpose computing on a graphics processing unit) capability and Nvidia’s CUDA technology.
The company claims that the new IPN250 offers unprecedented levels of computing performance for size, weight and power (SWaP) constrained platforms at lower cost. It combines Nvidia’s new GT240 96-core GPU with an Intel Core2 Duo processor operating at 2.26GHz and 8GBytes of DDR3 SDRAM to deliver up to 390 GFLOPS of performance per card slot; and enables system integrators to deploy a single COTS module.
GE said that its new SBC is designed to be compliant with the OpenVPX standard, for ensuring interoperability with other OpenVPX boards. It is also VITA48/REDI-compliant, allowing it to be deployed in the harshest environments, build options for air-, spray- and conduction cooling are available.
According to GE Intelligent Platforms, the new IPN250 features two primary data plane, 10 gigabit ethernet ports supporting multi-board switched fabric OpenVPX architectures, two 1000Base-T and two 1000Base-Bx control plane ports, additional PCI Express, USB 2.0 , SATA, COM ports, GPIO , audio and TV input. A 16-lane PCI Express gen2 interface on the P2 expansion plane provides high speed interconnect for multi-board GPGPU clusters as well as system I/O to PCI Express-enabled sensor modules.
The company said that the AXISLib multiprocessor software development VSIPL, DSP and math libraries for CUDA and INTEL SSE4 facilitate application development and code portability for the IPN250 and future GPGPU platforms.
In addition, it supports Linux, Windows, Microsoft DirectX, OpenCL, OpenGL and MATLAB, together with Nvidia’s PureVideo Technology and PhysX. Its video and multimedia is supported via the dual link DVI, HDMI and VGA ports directly into the Nvidia GT240 device.
Peter Cavill, general manager of military and aerospace products at GE Intelligent Platforms, said: “The IPN250 allows customers to easily deploy sophisticated applications developed on NVIDIA-enabled PCs directly onto a rugged GPGPU platform, reducing risk to schedules and shortening time to deployment.
“It reduces cost by leveraging the growing ecosystem of software programmers creating high performance computing applications in standard development environments such as CUDA, OpenCL, OpenGL and MATLAB, to support long term code portability across multiple generations of COTS hardware platforms.”
