Oceanport, New Jersey-based Concurrent Computer Corp will extend its existing relationship with back-end vector processor builder Mercury Computer Systems Inc, Chelmsford, Massachusetts and will now support the Mercury RACE VME 6U vector processors in its new MIPS Technologies Inc R-series RISC-based Maxion system. It says the vector processors will give the Maxion the floating-point performance required for many real-time applications and will be available in December. It will offer the RACE modules in two and four-processor configurations, with memory options ranging from 4Mb to 16Mb per processor – the new quad-processor boards from Mercury can each deliver up to 320 MFLOPS. Up to four boards will be supported at the time of initial availability and support for eight boards is planned by spring next year. Mercury currently uses Intel Corp 80860 RISCs in its vector processor, but has designed the RACE architecture to be chip-independent and in April announced that it would offer a PowerPC RISC coupled with Analog Devices Inc’s new Sharc Super Harvard Architecture Computer family of signal processors. It sees the new boards broadening its market penetration in real-time applications in defence, aerospace and medical electronics. Mercury plans to use PowerPC microprocessors in its RACE architecture to support applications and sub-applications needing a full-function RISC processor – back-end processing for sensor fusion, image analysis and target recognition. It sees the Sharc signal processor as complementary to the PowerPC, meeting the requirements of real-time applications needing very dense parallel vector processing and high-bandwidth data movement. It has 4M-bits of on-chip static RAM, executes up to 120 MFLOPS and has an input-output bandwidth of 240M-bytes per second. Adding PowerPC RISCs and Sharc signal processors will enable up to a four-fold improve ment over Mercury’s current capabi lity, which delivers 20 GFLOPS pro cessing power and 10G-bytes-per- second input-output in a standard commercial chassis, Mercury claims. Input-output options include FDDI, HIPPI, camera interfaces, analogue- to-digital interfaces and peripherals supported include RAID storage.
