Mercury debuts rugged GPGPU box

CES 2009: Best of show so far and unreleased ATI GPU.

CES seems pretty dull at first this year, with merely evolutionary changes showing up in almost everything. The one exception to this is a demo chassis by Mercury Computers, and it is by far the best thing we have seen at the show so far.

The base idea is simple, make a chassis for GPGPU computing in harsh environments like planes, offroad vehicles, and anything military. Think about targeting and pathfinding problems, horsepower like this is very useful. Some of these settings pound the daylights out of machinery, others have extreme temperature requirements, and a few do both, For that, Mercury designed this demo box.

Two opposite sides of the chassis have blade slots, each holding five blades, but only three are used. The middle one, without DVI slots for those with keen eyes, is basically a two-socket Xeon computer. It uses dual core chips, and plugs into a VXS connector meaning that it uses a passive PCIe backplane.

Each CPU blade supports two GPU blades for GPGPU/Stream computing. As you can see, the blades are basically a PCIe switch with two MXM slots. In each one, you can put an ATI mobile GPU, this one has the upcoming M98/4870 mobile in it. Each MXM can use up to an 88W GPU, but they will be nowhere near that number for now.

The demo box is just one iteration of a very flexible architecture. Mercury can add in any sort of connectivity that you need, linking cards with GigE or fiber channel, while putting multiple types of connectors on. Basically, if you need it, they can likely make it for you.

Prototypes are available now, so if you need to do something involving lots of number crunching in a place that gets banged around a lot, call Mercury. They can even drop the power down to sub-20W per blade should you require special cooling requirements.

So, in the end, you have a flexible, rugged and fast box that you can bend to your particular needs. Throw in an unreleased GPU, and you have something quite special. In this case, it is the coolest thing at CES so far.