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Software and are Key to Military HPEC System Development - COTS Journal

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Software and APIs are Key to Military HPEC KEYWORDS IN THIS ARTICLE: System Development VPX Vehicles Ultra-fast computing hardware for HPEC is getting easier to come by. But the most efficient path to UAV success means leveraging the wealth of standard APIs and software from the HPC realm. SBC Rugged Boxes CHAD AUGUSTINE. PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER – SOFTWARE CURTISS-WRIGHT DEFENSE SOLUTIONS Radar Rackmount Systems PCI Express GPGPU FPGAs Development Tools & Platforms Cooling Technologies

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Figure 1 - Serving HPEC needs, Fabric40 switch... Figure 2 - With a pair of quad-core Core-i7 (H... Figure 3 - Using the same industry standard so...

The military embedded computing industry's first big step in bringing highly scalable processing performance from the commercial High Performance Computing (HPC) world to rugged, deployed High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) architectures was the adoption in recent years of industry standard hardware devices and technologies from leading suppliers such as , AMD, NVIDIA, and Mellanox that enabled COTS PRODUCT INDEX 40 Gbit fabrics, such as Infiniband and 40 Gbit Ethernet, capable of supporting HPC throughput rates (Figure 1). Strengthen your search efforts The next big leap in embedded computing-based HPEC system development will be about software, not hardware. for COTS embedded Military . Web search engines only get you so far – especially if you're trying to find companies that make the right class of COTS product you need for your next system design. Read More...

http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/articles/view/104843[8/18/2015 12:14:53 PM] Software and APIs are Key to Military HPEC System Development - COTS Journal

Figure 1 Serving HPEC needs, Fabric40 switch and IO configurations seamlessly interoperate over the 40 Gb Ethernet and PCIe. An example Fabric40 board is VPX6-1958 a 6U OpenVPX SBC with 2.4 GHz 4th gen Haswell Core i7 Quad-Core 22nm .

By leveraging proven, robust development tools from the supercomputing world, aerospace and defense embedded system integrators will gain access to best-of-class open architecture APIs and tools, including , profilers, and communication and vector math libraries, that will ease and improve the design and verification of multi-node systems while greatly improving their time-to-deployment.

In today's environment, embedded computing customers frequently develop their own costly to layer on top of APIs provided by hardware vendors, to ensure flexibility and protect their system designs from being locked into proprietary software architectures. Hardware vendors, by bringing the embedded computing approach to software APIs and development tools, by identifying and supporting proven open sourced software libraries, middleware, and tools on their VPX-based HPEC systems will provide a non-proprietary open standards model for system software integration that eliminates the need for time consuming and expensive software customization (Figure 2). Adopting leading HPC-industry software will enable aerospace and defense embedded computing customers to better focus on their application development, to better fortify their differentiators and reduce development cycles.

ISS SOURCEBOOK

Figure 2 With a pair of quad-core Core-i7 (Haswell) processors, featuring the updated AVX 2.0 instruction units and redesigned on-chip graphics execution units, the CHAMP- AV9 is the DSP multi-processing component of Curtiss-Wright’s HPEC solution set.

Costly

We've consistently seen that software is, by far, the most costly component of system development programs. Over the last 5 or so years, interaction with embedded computing customer software , compared to interaction with hardware engineers, has increased as system integrators struggle to understand the implications of new hardware technologies from the software perspective. One of the main concerns of system integrators is how to embrace next generation hardware, via technology insertion, without detrimentally affecting the valuable, and often critical, code base that they've depended on, in many cases, for two or more decades. DIGITAL EDITION By moving to open APIs and using commercial supercomputing industry software standards, embedded computing system integrators will be better able to insert latest generation technologies and upgrade their legacy systems without having to re-invent the proverbial wheel. Even better, system integrators will gain increased flexibility by eliminating dependence on proprietary hardware drivers from a single vendor, through the use of open standard

http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/articles/view/104843[8/18/2015 12:14:53 PM] Software and APIs are Key to Military HPEC System Development - COTS Journal

middleware supported by a wide range of embedded computing hardware suppliers.

A non-trivial benefit of adopting HPC industry open standard APIs, middleware, and development tools in HPEC systems is the fact that these are the software standards that numerous college students are being taught today. The shear size of the HPC supercomputer industry, which services large commercial markets such as finance and high-end simulations, drives the growth of a large population of software programmers who are fluent in those very languages, such as MPI, CUDA, OpenCL, RoCE and OFED, that can be optimally leveraged in aerospace and defense system HPEC designs. By using the same industry standard software that students are learning in college, rather than developing proprietary APIs and tools, embedded computing vendors and customers can tap the knowledge and expertise of this programmer population, without requiring them to learn custom APIs or a different way of doing things. The table in Figure 3 lists several key HPC/HPEC APIs and tools.

WHITEPAPERS SMARC® - A Green Solution for Embedded Connectivity Serial Fabrics Handbook Figure 3 New! Putting FPGAs to Work in Software Radio Using the same industry standard software that students are learning in college lets Systems you tap the knowledge and expertise of this programmer population, without Dense FPGA Processing Engine: High requiring them to learn custom APIs. Bandwidth Interconnects And Powerfull FPGAs Provide Dense Sensor Processing Engine Leveraging HPC API Work MicroTCA Overview: A Brief Introduction to Micro Computing Architecture The large and growing user base of HPC software will also result in HPEC designers having access to APIs and Concepts middleware with far greater robustness. In the HPC community, the number of users writing API code likely numbers in the tens of thousands. Compare that to today's HPEC market, where in all likelihood the number of coders for a particular API probably ranges from the hundreds to the tens. The huge installed base of HPC users provides embedded computing users with significant "crowd sourcing" benefits, such as a far greater number of use cases and much more regression testing.

The large amount of feedback from the HPC open source user community is also available on the Internet no cost. This means that aerospace and defense HPEC designers can take advantage of the intense and rigorous development and testing that HPC architects need to support a 6,000 node supercomputer on their own 20 or 40- node embedded systems. Examples of the open source resources and knowledge bases that can be leveraged by embedded computing software engineers include: www.hpcwire.com, insidehpc.com and sc15.supercomputing.org.

It's only recently that significant adoption of commercial HPC software into the HPEC realm has become truly viable. For embedded deployed defense applications one of the key issues has always been determinism, which results from a combination of high throughput and low latency. Because these applications are often deployed in SWaP- constrained ground and airborne platforms, there is also an important physical factor to embedded computing hardware, a constraint that has not been historically associated with the rooms full of servers that support HPC computing.

Latency, Memory and More

The typical HPC code used from the 1990s-2000s often required too large of a to make it practical for use in an embedded computing system. While the older code's throughput might have been fast enough, the latency was often too high to support the embedded computing application's required determinism. This led to the rise in popularity of small footprint RTOSes in the aerospace and defense market.

What's changed more recently is that newer level multi-core processors, such as Intel's devices, are being increasingly used in newer commercial HPC applications, such as those found in the finance industry. These commercial applications share the same needs as some military applications (such as Electronic Warfare) for

http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/articles/view/104843[8/18/2015 12:14:53 PM] Software and APIs are Key to Military HPEC System Development - COTS Journal

extremely low latency, which in banking and investment houses is often measured in nanoseconds. To support these more demanding HPC applications, a new class of software, such as profilers that support cluster , has emerged that are optimized for throughput, latency, and smaller memory footprints.

What's more, HPC software is also now increasingly coming under some of the same SWaP pressures as those commonly found in the embedded computing market. Massive HPC data centers, such as those used by Wall Street firms and the NSA, are more frequently bumping up against power limits. Local power companies are being stretched to the limit to provide the powerlines needed to support the racks of computers and air conditioning required by large scale server farms. As a result, supercomputer designers are pursuing efforts to reduce the size and power requirements of their system architectures in order to deliver ever more PetaFLOPS of performance. These recent HPC system trends have all converged to benefit embedded computing designers, making it possible to identify and "cherry pick" best-of-class HPC software for use in embedded computing systems, rather than developing new software for our much smaller market.

Embracing Standards Avoids Risk

Last, but not least, one of the greatest benefits of leveraging open standard HPC software in the embedded computing market is that it effectively removes the risk from developing large scale embedded computer clusters. We are now able to take advantage of the advances and successes of the HPC community, which is collectively focused daily on solving these problems. It's time for embedded computing vendors and embedded system integrators to benefit from the vast array of existing open standard drivers, middleware, and libraries and the proven solutions for cluster-wide tools, performance profiling, performance reports, data performance analysis, and built-in-test tools that have already been developed for commercial use.

Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions Ashburn, VA (703) 779-7800 www.cwcdefense.com

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http://www.cotsjournalonline.com/articles/view/104843[8/18/2015 12:14:53 PM]