Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. using Cell BE

A leading provider of inspection solutions turned to Mercury to gain a competitive edge for its scanning system. Mercury evaluated several hardware acceleration technologies, including FPGAs and GPUs, before landing on a solution using the multicore Cell Broadband Engine(TM) processor.

Mercury Computer Systems

Cell BE - activity in the defense space

Late in Mercury Computer Systems Earnings Conference call, a listener asked for the '08 projection of revenue from Cell based systems. The answer was positive, but modestly so.

Apparently, 40-50 cell based systems are in different locations in labs under evaluation. '08 revenue may be in the high single digit millions. There is good activity in the defense space.

Listen here.

Mercury Computer Systems Releases Software Development Kit for Sony Playstation 3

From Mercury Computer Systems press release:

The PS3 and its Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor have gained worldwide recognition as revolutionary technologies with profound capabilities reaching beyond the gaming market. As the first company to bring the Cell BE processor into commercial and military markets, Mercury is now opening the door to affordable, high-performance computing for a broad range of applications. Using Mercury's proven development environment, developers in research labs, universities, gaming, financial services, oil & gas, electronic data automation, video compression, biotech, and other areas can explore the highest performing potential of Cell BE processor-based computing using PS3 devices.

Joe's links

JEDEC finalizes and published standards for DDR3 memory. Read more at Xbitlabs.com or Personal Computer World or TechWorld or the JEDEC standard (188 pages).

Mercury Computer Systems and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have Cell Broadband Engine processor poised to assist U.S. government with national security. Read more at DailyTech.

HT Pinehurst Joe.

Mercury Computer Systems to increase Cell portfolio

Mercury Computer Systems (MRCY) announced (6/20/07) that it is collaborating with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to apply multicore technology such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor to help tackle computational challenges in national security, cyberspace, and bioinformatics.

"We're excited to be working with PNNL, and about the possibilities of applying multicore computing technology to enable the development of economically viable computing solutions to previously intractable problems," said Jay Bertelli, President and CEO of Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. "Early results from our collaboration show that, together, we can analyze streaming data in real time, which has been a critical challenge for data-intensive computing. Our goal is to open the door for new applications."

Mercury Computer Systems press release linked here.

Mercury wins a "Beacon"

in the category of "Best IBM Embedded Power Architecture(TM) Solution."

Mercury collaborated with Mentor Graphics to design and develop a fully integrated electronic design automation (EDA) platform based on the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor. Mercury successfully migrated Mentor's Calibre nmOPC EDA software product to its Cell BE processor-based high- performance compute cluster.

Read Mercury's press release linked here.

Cell Technology - Professional Video Market

Mercury Computer Systems and IPV Limited will demonstrate "new-generation technology that enables an order-of-magnitude performance improvement for video processing applications" at NAB2007, April 16-19, 2007 held in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As announced in March, Mercury and IPV are collaborating to develop and deliver software tools, libraries, and applications based on the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor. The Cell BE processor was developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba for the Sony Playstation(R) 3 video game console and other consumer electronics devices. Mercury is leading adoption of this powerful multicore processor in non-gaming markets that include, medical imaging, video processing, semiconductor, seismic computation, and ray tracing.

Read the Mercury press release linked here.

Mercury to assist safer landings

A Rambus Inc. IP licensee, lands (pun intended) new contract:

"BAE Systems Australia has chosen Mercury Computer Systems to provide a Synthetic Vision display for a flight-ready prototype brownout landing system for rotorcraft," said Operations Director Jim Hanson. "Mercury and BAE Systems will be working closely to assemble and integrate the system."

In 2002, the President of the American Helicopter Society identified brownout landings as the most critical safety issue facing rotorcraft. Brownouts can occur when a rotorcraft attempts to land on dusty terrain. When a helicopter descends through the last 50 feet -- the most critical stage of any landing -- the downwash created by the rotors pick up the dust on the ground. This can reduce the pilot's visibility to zero. Dozens of helicopter accidents and deaths, both civilian and military, have been attributed to brownout landing accidents.

To address this problem, civil and government groups in the U.S. and abroad have begun to explore the issue by developing sensors that could detect terrain and obstacles. "See and Remember," a phrase coined by the Air Force Research Lab, refers to a brownout landing system that scans the landing area before the rotors kick up the dust. The scan is then fed to a computer that "remembers" where the terrain is, and then draws it on a cockpit-mounted computer monitor in 3D as the craft descends. In this way, the pilot has a 3D image of the terrain, even when visibility through the window is nil. The technology that generates this computer-drawn terrain from databases and sensor readings is called Synthetic Vision.

Read Mercury's press release here.

Mercury Computer Systems - Cell BE

In an 8-K filing (1/25/07) Mercury Computer Systems reported the results of its quarter ending December 31, 2006, with GAAP losses per Share of $0.05 and Non-GAAP Earnings per Share of $0.01.

Many of its reported (pages 3-6) recent highlights laud its Cell Broadband Engine successes:

In the second quarter of fiscal 2007, the Company reported several new customers in life sciences, increasing interest in Mercury’s Cell Broadband Engine ™ (BE) processor-based solutions, and continued adoption of industry-standard technology which Mercury helped to create. These trends signal the growing need for performance acceleration, as well as a growing transition from in-house design and build to third-party solutions, for computationally intensive applications. Organizations are increasingly moving toward optimized, more cost-effective solutions that help to free up valuable in-house resources and deliver faster time to market; and as evidenced in the second quarter, they are turning to Mercury.

Mercury also signed a strategic cooperation with The Institute of Medical Physics (IMP) of Erlangen for the joint development and commercialization of medical imaging technology deployed on the Cell BE processor. Preliminary results show a 100x improvement in CT (computed tomography) reconstruction speed as well as enhanced visualization of medical imaging data.

Mercury is working with numerous technology companies and educational institutions in leveraging the performance capabilities of the Cell BE processor, to solve various specialized application challenges in seismic computation, video processing, various semiconductor process applications, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), molecular modeling in biotech, and ray tracing. Organizations such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Software Integration and Visualization Office (SIVO) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have purchased Mercury Cell BE processor-based hardware, software, and/or optimization services. Other companies highlighted in second quarter announcements include Boston University and Mentor Graphics.

In November, preliminary results of an order-of-magnitude performance improvement were announced for the joint development effort with the Structural Bioinformatics Lab of Boston.

Mercury Cell BE press releases linked here.

(Cell Broadband Engine is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.)

IBM to cash in on its chips

While Intel and AMD focused on a perceived need for speed, IBM followed an path of multi-core design and partnerships. IBM chips are in Wii, Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 and it hopes to parley its recent success into billions of dollars over the next decade. Part of IBM's hope hinges on the Cell processor.

"From a technological perspective, we still have a tremendous amount of upside," said Bernie Meyerson, chief technologist for IBM's systems group. "We've only gone down this road one turn."

IBM is working with other companies, such as Mercury Computing Systems Inc., to adapt Cell and other chips for their own new devices. Cell powers a line of IBM servers and is being used in a supercomputer for the Los Alamos nuclear lab. Toshiba plans to use the chip in TVs.

However, even with Cell's performance boosts, it could have limited paths into other systems unless IBM can encourage many software developers to create applications that take advantage of Cell's unusual architecture.

Read an interesting article about IBM linked here at the Baltimore Sun.

Mercury Computer Systems Inc. & Cell BE Processor

Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. announced (11/20/06) a cooperation with the Institute of Medical Physics (IMP) of Erlangen, Germany, which is focused on the joint development and commercialization of medical imaging technology deployed on the Cell Broadband Engine (TM) (BE) processor.

Under the terms of the agreement, Mercury is working together with the IMP on designing and implementing ambitious reconstruction and visualization algorithms with real-time performance on the Cell BE processor, to deliver orders-of-magnitude performance increases while also reducing the complexity and costs of medical image processing systems. Together with IMP technology, Mercury will integrate the algorithms into high-performance Cell BE processor- based systems designed to significantly accelerate the reconstruction and visualization of medical imaging data for medical OEMs.

Read the entire press release linked here.

Cell BE finds home medical imaging

Mercury Computer Systems will demonstrate its Visage 3D at the 92nd Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiology Society of North America at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, November 26-30.

From Mecury's press release: (emphasis added)

In Reconstruction, Mercury will demonstrate more than 100X improvement in CT reconstruction performance over solutions with conventional microprocessors, with the Mercury Cell Accelerator Board (CAB). Based on the Cell Broadband Engine(TM) (BE) processor, the CAB is a PCI Express(R) accelerator card and is available with optimized algorithms, and multicore and multicomputer programming expertise from Mercury. The Cell BE processor's extensive parallelism, along with vast I/O capabilities, permits efficient implementation of complex CT reconstruction algorithms with close to real-time performance. The CAB with Mercury software enables system designers to develop medical imaging solutions that can create images obtained from more precise algorithms, with higher quality and much faster than ever before.

Read Mercury's press release (11/15/06) linked here.