The GRA111 is among the first commercially available products to feature NVIDIA's new GT 240 graphics processing unit (GPU), and is the first rugged implementation of a CUDA-capable GPU.
The GRA111 is the first member of GE Fanuc's planned family of CUDA-enabled products which are expected to revolutionise military and aerospace embedded computing by bringing a ‘supercomputing' capability to applications and environments that require leading-edge processing, such as radar, signals intelligence and video surveillance and interpretation.
NVIDIA's CUDA is a general-purpose parallel computing architecture that takes advantage of the parallel compute engine in NVIDIA's GPUs to solve many computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a general-purpose CPU.
It includes the CUDA Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and the parallel compute engine of the GPU.
CUDA has been shown to deliver a 100x increase in speed in a broad range of applications that lend themselves to parallel computing.
Early tests at GE Fanuc have shown that military applications can benefit from similar increases in speed.
A major prime contractor in the military/aerospace industry has evaluated the CUDA architecture in a radar system, and found that performance improvement of 15x is achievable with minimal reprogramming effort.
The 3U format GRA111 derives much of its performance from the 96 cores, 128-bit memory interface, 1 Gbyte of DDR3 video memory, 16-lane PCI Express Gen 2 interface, 540MHz graphics clock and 1,302MHz processor clock of the NVIDIA GT 240 GPU.
Optionally available as an Line Replaceable Module (LRM) in accordance with the VPX-REDI 9VITA 48 standard and with a rich set of I/O, the advanced capabilities of the GRA111 can also be applied to many of the most common graphics and video applications.
Dual, independent channels mean that it is capable of driving RGB analogue component video, digital DVI 1.0, and HDMI standards.
In addition, the GRA111's video input capability allows integration of sensor data using RS170, NTSC or PAL video formats.
GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms is represented in Australia and New Zealand by Metromatics.