InfiniBand Goes Rugged With OpenVPX

Jan. 21, 2013

Mercury Computer combines two powerhouse technologies with its LDS6523 OpenVPX single board computer including Intel's 2.3 GHz Core i7 quad-core Ivy Bridge mobile-class processor and Mellanox ConnectX-3 InfiniBannd host adapters.

William G. Wong

Mercury Computer combines two powerhouse technologies with its LDS6523 OpenVPX single board computer (Fig. 1) that is a VITA 65/46/48 (VPX-REDI) compliant form factor. The 6U LDS6523 board is based on Intel's 2.3 GHz Core i7 quad-core Ivy Bridge mobile-class processor and Mellanox ConnectX-3 InfiniBannd host adapter.

Figure 1. Mercury Computers' LDS6523 is based on Intel's Core i7 quad-core Ivy Bridge mobile-class processor and Mellanox ConnectX-3 InfiniBannd host adapter.

The quad-core Core i7 processor supports Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction set (see "Intel's AVX Scales To 1024 bit Vector Math" on electronicdesign.com). AVX gets a workout in military and avionic applications as well as "Big Data" that is also moving into these more rugged application areas. AVX doubles the width of the processor's SIMD engine. The low density server board targets industrial and military applications like CyberINT, IMINT, SIGINT and radar processing.

The system actually has two ConnectX-3 adapters. Each adapter supports two 40 Gbit/s InfiniBand fabric connections. The connections support Double Data Rate (DDR), Quad Data Rate (QDR) and 40 Gbit InfiniBand speeds. The LDS6523 has a pair of mezzanine sites. One is a PMC/XMC site and the other is an XMC site.

Mercury Computers also delivers open software and middleware. This includes support for standards like OFED and MPI.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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