SCIENCE

LynuxWorks and Themis Computer has announced that they have ported the latest version of the LynxSecure separation kernel and hypervisor to the CoolShell and Rugged Enterprise Servers (RES) server platforms. The LynuxWorks highly secure virtualization solution and Themis high-performance multi-core rugged blade servers provide one of the most advanced multilevel secure platforms for use in military and aerospace systems available today.

The first showing of LynxSecure 5.0 running on a Themis CoolShell platform will be at the Embedded Systems Conference in Silicon Valley from May 2-4 and in the LynuxWorks' Booth (#771) at the DoDIIS conference (Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems) in Detroit from May 1-5, where both LynuxWorks and Themis technical staff will be available to demonstrate the combined product.

"LynxSecure 5.0 raises the bar for secure virtualization systems running on Intel processors, by combining ultra security with unparalleled features and functionality, without compromising the performance and determinism required for military embedded systems," said Gurjot Singh, CEO and president at LynuxWorks. "Running LynxSecure on the Themis high-performance rugged hardware provides the best platform for developing next-generation secure military systems, and LynuxWorks is looking forward to a long and successful relationship with Themis."

LynxSecure makes it possible to securely run multiple guest operating systems and their applications on a single platform. It does this by isolating applications into separate partitions to prevent unintended or dangerous software interactions. Any communication between the secure partitions is controlled by security policies defined by the system administrator and enforced by LynxSecure.

LynxSecure 5.0 offers a host of new features that boost the performance of guest operating systems and applications that run on top of it, offering close to native performance even when running fully virtualized or unmodified guest operating systems. LynxSecure 5.0 also supports symmetric multi-processing guest operating systems in both para-virtualized and fully virtualized forms, enabling flexible use of modern multi-core processors to gain the best performance for secure systems and applications.

"Security is a key requirement for many of our military customers," said William Kehret, CEO and president at Themis. "However, compromising the performance to which they are accustomed, is not an option," explained Kehret. "We believe that the combination of our high-performance CoolShell and RES servers, with LynxSecure 5.0, provides the highest levels of security and application performance, available in the industry today."

The principle barrier to higher compute density in modular electronic packaging is the cooling of high dissipation devices, most notably, the new breed of multi-core microprocessors. Designed for thermal and kinetic management, and featuring the latest four and six-core Xeon processors from Intel®, the Themis family of XR3 RES platforms provide high reliability and performance, to assure application availability in the most demanding environments. These rack mountable servers are available in 1U, 2U and 3U configurations.

The CoolShell rugged server technology combines a high-performance, single-board computer and graphics processor in a blade server configuration, for rugged systems applications in demanding environments. CoolShell blade servers use commercial CPU boards in rugged packages that provide electronics cooling and thermal management. The CoolShell CS-3U and CS-5U systems are modularly maintainable, commercial blade server systems that combine an extended complement of processing, memory and I/O, into a 3U or 5U rack mountable CoolShell subrack, and provide thermal footprint headroom to accommodate aggressive scaling of commercial microprocessor core density, speed, and power.