NPN240 - Military Embedded Systems Editor's Choice March/April 2010

NPN240 - Military Embedded Systems Editor's Choice March/April 2010


NPN240 Chosen as an Editor's Choice product by Military Embedded Systems magazine for March/April 2010.

Chris Ciufo, OpenSystems Media, Group Editorial Director, Military and Aerospace Group wrote:

"As with most things new (and thus somewhat in the experimental stage), you never know where they will be used … and that’s what keeps things interesting. Case in point: We hear about military “supercomputing” from time to time, but this is probably the first time we’ve heard about it paired with OpenVPX (VITA 65). The embodiment: GE Intelligent Platforms’ NPN240 6U OpenVPX CUDA-capable multiprocessor. Armed with two 96-core NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs, the rugged OpenVPX and VPX-REDI (VITA 48) platform can execute at up to 750 GFLOPS peak per card slot. And, to boost the supercomputing exponentially: Several NPN240s can link with multiple hosts (or sometimes even a single host), resulting in multi-node CUDA GPU clusters rendering thousands of GFLOPS. This computational density comes in handy in SWaP-constrained apps, including sonar, radar, video and graphics imaging, and sensor/signal processing too.

Compatible with any OpenVPX host SBC, NPN240 also features parallel GPGPU (General Purpose computing on a Graphics Processing Unit) processing, touted by the company as a more cost-effective alternative to utilizing FPGA-based technologies. Other notables include each GPU node’s 16-lane PCI Express gen2 system-Backplace interface and local DDR3 SDRAM, along with NPN240’s harsh-environment-savvy conduction-, spray-, and air-cooling options."

Military Embedded Systems magazine. Copyright OpenSystems Media, 2010. All rights reserved; used with permission