ACADEMIA

GE announced that it had established a High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) Center of Excellence (CoE) that will provide a focus for the future development of a range of powerful, flexible products and solutions for military/aerospace embedded computing.

GE Intelligent Platforms already has an extensive range of HPEC solutions designed for the harsh, demanding environments that are typical of military deployments. These include focused board level solutions, complete sub-systems, and an expanding software development environment that takes advantage of GE's AXIS -- Advanced Multiprocessor Integrated Software.

The primary goal of the new Center will be to support customer demand for high TRL (technology readiness level) COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) solutions that can shorten time-to-market, minimize cost and help to eliminate program risk, allowing prime contractors, system integrators and OEMs to focus on value-add and create competitive advantage. The Center will take advantage of GE's COTS Rugged Systems (CRS) capability to support the rapid deployment of systems to the field.

The Center will also support the development of custom systems that are configured, tested and integrated with software to meet specific customer needs. Additionally, consulting services will be available through the HPEC CoE that can help customers with architecture definition, application development and performance optimization. It will also create application-focused algorithms for use in performance and capability demonstrations which can be provided to customers to assist in their development process.

"Our growing range of HPEC products is ideally suited to the escalating demand for sophisticated radar and ISR solutions," said Jay Swenson, Marketing and Business Development Director, Military & Aerospace, GE Intelligent Platforms. "Establishing this new Center of Excellence allows us to create a single point of contact for our customers as well as to redouble our focus on ensuring that our HPEC solutions continue to deliver the performance and flexibility our customers need."

GE Intelligent Platforms' existing HPEC solutions include a range of Intel- and PowerPC-based single board computers and multiprocessor boards. GE was the first company to introduce a rugged COTS NVIDIA CUDA GPGPU- (general purpose processing on a graphics processing unit) based solution focused on defense applications and offers a variety of NVIDIA-based solutions in this category.

GE is also pioneering many next generation solutions that use high speed interconnects such as InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, many-core network processors, and video- and sensor processing, and supports these with a broad range of powerful and flexible development tools and libraries. These high performance solutions are based on open architectures including OpenVPX and VITA 48.5, which offer standards-based interoperability and advanced thermal optimization, reducing both development time and deployment risk. GE's support for open standards in HPEC includes Linux, OpenMPI, VSIPL and VSIPL++, among others.