Mercury Systems, Inc. of Andover, MA announced on January 23 the EnsembleSeries SFM6126 OpenVPX PCI Express (PCIe) gen 3 switch with innovative capabilities for creating a true composable data center edge processing architecture for aerospace and defense applications. This represents a critical data distribution building block for Mercury’s comprehensive embedded data center compute architecture, ensuring availability in space-constrained, harsh environments. The rugged 6U modules are unique in their ability to switch both the control and expansion planes to support the inter-module data distribution architecture required by high-performance OpenVPX high-performance embedded edge computing (HPEEC) subsystems.
“One of the latest trends in commercial data centers is to use a composable infrastructure which allows the computing, storage, and switch fabric resources to be individually changed – aggregated, disaggregated, and composed – based on an application’s precise needs, giving system architects much greater flexibility in deploying and reconfiguring resources as needed,” said Joe Plunkett, Mercury’s vice president and general manager for Sensor Processing Solutions.
“We have applied that approach with our new EnsembleSeries SFM6126 switch, using PCIe switching to embed a composable data center ‘I/O distribution architecture’ in size, weight and power (SWaP)-constrained harsh environments. This fundamental capability enables our customers to equip our military with the smarter, more capable platforms and systems they need to detect and defeat emerging threats from adversaries, and once again showcases the power of Mercury to make commercial technology profoundly more accessible to aerospace and defense,” Plunkett said.
Why they matter:
Artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous platforms, cognitive electronic
warfare (EW) and sensor fusion demand huge processing resources that can be
well served by leveraging a composable data center architecture. The hardware
challenge for deploying these applications at the tactical edge pivots around
making data center technology sufficiently small, lightweight and
power-efficient. Additionally, these processing resources should be rugged for
survivability and run cool for reliability. An embedded composable architecture
is ideally suited to demanding processing-intensive applications, giving
warfighters greater situational awareness to counter sophisticated threats.
What they deliver:
EnsembleSeries SFM6126 switches are a key component of a truly composable HPEEC solution, which include EnsembleSeries HDS6605 server blades and streaming IOM-400 I/O modules. Collectively, these modules leverage and scale the latest data center processing technologies to accelerate demanding workloads in the harshest, most SWaP-constrained environments.
Source: Mercury Systems
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