Thales Computers is on the cutting edge of VME and fabric-based systems like Serial RapidIO. It had a number of offerings at Bus and Board. One was the PowerNode5 (see Fig. 1). This 6U VME board is a ruggedized version of IBM’s JS20 single board computer. It employs a heat pipe system for conduction cooling (see Fig. 2). It allows applications to migrate to a rugged environment without changes.
The board contains a pair of 1.6-GHz IBM 970FX processors with up to 2 Gbytes of DDR SDRAM with ECC support. It has a pair of Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, but its primary link to the outside world is through its Serial RapidIO switch that connects to the backplane and on-board processors. Pricing starts at $11,260.
Of course, the PowerNode5 is not Thales’ only system with a Serial RapidIO switch. All you need to do is take a PowerNode3 and pop on their Serial RapidIO PMC-RIO module. The PMC-RIO provides four Serial RapidIO ports. The board has a sustained bandwidth of 400 Mbytes/s per link for a total of 1.6 Gbytes/s. Not too shabby. The system software support includes Lynx 4 and VxWorks. Pricing for the PowerNode3 and RMC-RIO bundle starts at $10,200.
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www.thalescomputers.com
