ImpactRT S500 Mercury Computer Systems System Board

The Mercury Computing Systems ImpactRT S500 cPCI System Board is the first complete RACE++ system implemented on a single board. It is a complete multiprocessing system with four 500 MHz PowerPC® 7410 compute nodes and an onboard PowerPC 8240 host processor, delivered in a 6U cPCI form factor. Designed for value-oriented applications, the ImpactRT S500 reduces costs at both the board level and system level. The G4 processors are placed directly on the board to do away with daughtercards, and the on-board host eliminates the need for a separate single board computer to act as the system controller.

Each ImpactRT S500 compute node includes a 500 MHz PowerPC 7410 processor with 128 MB of SDRAM, 2 MB of L2 cache, and an ASIC that connects the node to the RACE++ fabric. The PPC 7410s include the AltiVec vector processing unit, which revolutionizes the performance of computationally intensive applications such as image and signal processing by operating on up to four floating-point numbers or up to sixteen 8-bit integers with a single instruction. When operating at 500 MHz, the 128-bit AltiVec vector engine can execute floating-point calculations at a rate up to 4 GFLOPS and can execute byte data (e.g., 8-bit pixels) up to 16 GOPS (16x10⁹ arithmetic operations per second) by performing two operations per cycle on each of 16 bytes of data. Scalable to 6 boards with 24 G4 processors connected by the RACE++ switch fabric, the ImpactRT S500 provides up to 96 GFLOPS or 384 GOPS of performance.

he ImpactRT S500 provides a variety of on-board I/O options. An integrated 10/100BaseT Ethernet interface is located on the module's front panel, as is an RS-232 serial port, which is directly connected to the on-board 8240 host processor. The module also contains a 64-bit PMC (PCI Mezzanine Card) site. This site can be used for system I/O, supporting industry-standard PMC cards as interfaces to a wide variety of devices, from Fibre Channel disk interfaces to A/D converters.