Mercury Systems to provide Intel Select Solution for hardened security with Lockheed Martin

Mercury Systems announced that it will offer an Intel Select Solution for Hardened Security with Lockheed Martin. Designed to help defense and aerospace customers secure mission-critical data, the solution will provide hardened, full stack security that delivers ideal performance which sets new standards of affordability for secure and rugged tactical edge computing.

The U.S.-designed solution will be manufactured and tested in Mercury’s Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA)-accredited facilities and is expected to be delivered to the market in mid-2019.

“Mercury has over thirty years of expertise in building secure rackmount, embedded and custom Intel commercial off-the-shelf solutions for deployment into ground, surface, subsurface and airborne environments,” said Scott Orton, Vice President and General Manager of Mercury’s Trusted Mission Solutions group. “Our long-standing partnership with Intel enables us to provide high-performance, sophisticated platforms that meet or exceed the mission requirements of Department of Defense end-customers and industry-leading prime contractors, such as Lockheed Martin.”

Mercury also announced the EnsembleSeries HDS6605 blade server, the embedded computing powerful, general-purpose processing 6U OpenVPX blade server with hardware-enabled support for artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

Powered by second generation Intel Xeon scalable processors, HDS6605 blade servers feature the same cooling, packaging and 100 Gbps in-system switch fabric interconnect technologies found in earlier proven generations of Mercury blades based on Intel Xeon processors. These open systems-compliant technologies have a technology readiness level of nine (TRL-9), making HDS6605 blades well-suited to rugged defense applications and upgrades that require the utmost in processing capability.

HDS6605 blade servers are highly optimized for AI and other extreme compute-intensive general processing workloads typically associated with sensor fusion, complex C4I and deep-learning applications.

Second Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors feature Intel Deep Learning Boost, which extends Intel Advanced Vector Extensions-512 (Intel AVX-512) to accelerate inference applications like speech recognition, image recognition, language translation, object detection, and more.

Its new set of embedded accelerators (Vector Neural Network Instructions, or VNNIs) speed up dense computations characteristic of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and deep neural networks (DNNs), delivering up to a 14 times improvement in inference performance compared to the first-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor launched in July 2017. Along with increased scalability via ultrapath interconnect (UPI) , each blade provides up to 22 cores from a single 1.9GHz device, delivering an industry-topping 2.6 TFLOPS of general-purpose processing power.

Mercury also announced the start of customer engagements for its second generation of the TRRUST-Stor VPX RT line of radiation-tolerant solid state drives (SSD) featuring up to 940GB user capacity in a 6U SpaceVPX form factor.

The new device delivers enhanced versatility with improved error correction code (ECC) and both Serial RapidIO and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) host interfaces. As the first space-qualified storage devices leveraging the SpaceVPX standard for agile interoperability, the TRRUST-Stor VPX RT family enables accelerated system design directly addressing the growing demand for low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and mission critical systems operating in radiation-intense environments.

In terrestrial environments, the NAND flash memory devices used in a traditional SSD device are prone to data corruption without the use of ECC. In radiation-exposed environments, data corruption is vastly accelerated due to the occurrence of single-event effects (SEE) and total ionizing dose (TID) degradation which negatively impact the functionality of the NAND flash memory used in the device.

To counter these damaging effects, Mercury has improved the ECC performance of the original 3U TRRUST-Stor VPX RT device. With 30 percent more error corrections built-in, the company’s new 6U device integrates high-reliability defect mitigation thereby enabling normal read and write operations in the presence of harmful ionizing radiation. Additionally, the new SSD features redundant NAND flash to further improve long-term reliability and data integrity.