Flying Server Goes Airborne with Mercury Systems
CHELMSFORD, Mass. October 3, 2013 Mercury Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRCY, www.mrcy.com), a best-of-breed provider of commercially developed, open sensor and Big Data processing systems for critical commercial, defense and intelligence applications, announced the deployment of the most powerful OpenVPX™-based sensor processing subsystem ever developed for an airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) application.
Based on the OpenVPX open architecture standard, the subsystem can process and exploit huge amounts of sensor data in real-time, store it onboard for retrieval and forensic analysis and send imagery to ground stations or hand-held devices. This massive real-time compute capability is achieved through the skillful integration of Intel® Xeon® server-class processors, general purpose graphical processing units (GPGPUs) and ruggedized solid state disk storage arrays, effectively providing a unique, open commodity-class server capability for SWaP-constrained airborne environments.
“Decision making requires information, and if you have to wait for it to be stored and analyzed on the ground, the time lost can be the difference between mission success and failure,” said Ian Dunn, Vice President and General Manager of Mercury’s Embedded Multicomputing Group. “Onboard processing and actionable intelligence dissemination are the logical and critical next steps in airborne ISR development, but deployment is slowed by the processing power available and the exponential growth of the data being collected. Our ability to deploy this subsystem – effectively a data center ‘server in the sky’ – onto airborne pods and platforms is another example of Mercury’s continued leadership in OpenVPX, and our ability to leverage open architecture to meet the right mix of performance, time-to-market and affordability constraints. We believe these capabilities have truly opened up new horizons in airborne sensor processing for our customers.”
Board-level fabrication and cooling technologies, unique to Mercury, enable deployment of rugged, server-class compute power within harsh airborne environments. Theater-proven, these technologies deliver 1-inch pitch OpenVPX modules that are efficiently cooled for full-throttle processing, neatly addressing the onboard sensor processing challenge. Coupled with software tools for managing the convergence of data processing and information exploitation, these advances are uniquely delivering commodity-class finally enabling the Defense industry to realize its goal of making the “tactical cloud” a reality for the warfighter.
