Menu

Preservation of VPX Investment and AI Transportable GPU Platforms

May 24, 2022

Military Plane

By Jim Reardon, One Stop Systems

The OpenVPX standards occupy a special place in deployed military compute platforms.  Designed as a successor to VME64, the OpenVPX (ANSI 65) and related standards such as SOSA have offered the opportunity to package COTS systems that meet the challenging environmental and electrical requirements of military vehicles across all services.  AI Transportable systems incorporate GPUs and switched fabrics that were not envisioned by the existing standard and threaten to force significant new investment in product development before deployment of next generation systems such as C4ISR

AI Transportable systems, such as the One Stop Systems' Rigel, achieve extraordinary compute performance by use of multiple GPUs and new generation switched fabrics, such as PCIe Gen4 and NVIDIA® NVLink™.  Today, these elements do not map well into the legacy standard.  Among the significant challenges are power supply, conduction cooling, and the limitations of the OpenVPX backplane definition that limit PCIe lane capacity. To preserve the significant industry and government investment in OpenVPX products, a hybrid solution is needed to gain the performance benefits of GPUs, such as NVIDIA® A100 Tensor Core GPUs in next-generation deployments.

With the introduction of Rigel, we can now offer product extensions to support existing OpenVPX and SOSA-compliant sensor I/O, while offering direct access to the performance of Rigel GPUs where it is useful to support new and more demanding applications.  Relying on OSS experience with PCIe Gen4 (and now Gen5) expansion, such a combination is now architecturally feasible, offers reduced sensor latency (with the potential to completely bypass host memory buffers), while preserving two decades of industry and government investment in existing SOSA interface solutions.

At the heart of a Rigel system is a PCIe Gen 4 switched fabric that provides the capacity to support the NVIDIA HGX™ module, which itself consists of four NVIDIA® A100 GPUs.  Each of the GPUs features an external 16-lane PCIe connection, as well as private NVIDIA NVLink connection to the other GPUs.  To manage access to the GPUs, Rigel manages this complexity by implementing a versatile PCIe switched fabric and related management software that allows dynamic or fixed lane routing between GPUs, hosts, memory, and I/O according to application demands.  Of course, the PCIe requirements of SOSA-compliant accessories in VPX format is accomplished by extending the PCIe Gen 4 Host Bus Adapter expansion technology developed by OSS.

Figure 1 – Conceptual Hybrid Rigel

Through OpenVPX extensions to Rigel, new levels of low-latency sensor acquisition are possible.  Direct access to memory in the GPUs without transit through host memory is possible, unlocking new levels of sensor bandwidth as latency is reduced.  By way of this architecture, the role of the host processor gives way to the GPUs, which can offer greater computing power, flexible data formats, and of course, parallelism. 

In AI Transportables, GPUs and switched fabrics will play a key role in lifting the legacy application performance limits.  Combining Rigel and OSS host bus adapter and extender technology, the life of legacy SOSA interfaces can be extended. Placing the managed switch fabric at the heart of these applications, even the GPU elements can be replaced with newer generations, while preserving other elements of the system for reuse.

If you would like to learn more about hybrid Rigel, please be in touch!

Click the buttons below to share this blog post!

Return to the main Blog page




Leave a comment

Comments will be approved before showing up.


Also in One Stop Systems Blog

Datalogging in Autonomous Military
Unveiling the Strategic Edge: Datalogging in Autonomous Military Vehicles

March 11, 2024

The landscape of modern warfare is undergoing a profound transformation with the integration of cutting-edge technologies, and at the forefront of this evolution are autonomous military vehicles. Datalogging, a seemingly inconspicuous yet indispensable technology, plays a pivotal role in shaping the capabilities and effectiveness of these autonomous marvels. In this blog post, we delve into the critical role of datalogging in autonomous military vehicles and its impact on the future of defense strategies.

Continue Reading

Redundancy and Management of Rugged Edge Servers
Redundancy and Management of Rugged Edge Servers

February 13, 2024 2 Comments

Computer server redundancy, including backup power supplies, RAID storage devices and applications that automatically fail-over, keeps critical systems up and running longer than non-redundant systems. Similarly, effective system monitoring can provide early warning of failures and allow system managers to remotely manage these systems, further improving application uptime. While the concepts of computer system redundancy and system management are well-established in all levels of computing, from the personal computer to the largest hyperscale datacenters, the unique challenges of placing datacenter-class computing elements performing AI applications in mobile edge environments, like aircraft, ships, and land vehicles, brings unique challenges to system redundancy and management. 

Continue Reading

Accelerating Scientific Discovery with HPC Solutions
Accelerating Scientific Discovery with HPC Solutions

January 08, 2024

The realm of scientific simulations is a realm of immense complexity, where models often involve millions of interacting parameters and trillions of calculations. HPC systems provide the computational muscle to tackle these daunting challenges, but they also present unique technical hurdles.

Continue Reading

You are now leaving the OSS website