OREANDA-NEWS. June 19, 2012. GE Intelligent Platforms (NYSE: GE) today announced Version 5.1 of its AXIS Advanced Multiprocessor Integrated Software development environment that is designed to make the development of complex, sophisticated military/aerospace applications - such as digital signal processing (DSP), radar, sonar, SIGINT and sensor processing - simpler and faster, reducing program risk, effort and expense and shortening time to market.

AXIS, which is a key element in GE’s High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) offering, enables fast prototyping, thus maximizing the effectiveness of internal research and development (IRAD) efforts, while support for the VSIPL open standard API allows straightforward code portability from one CPU generation to the next, improving long term cost of ownership. Support for VSIPL++ is also available.

As well as supporting GE’s latest multicore hardware – including the powerful DSP280 multiprocessor DSP platform and the SBC624 and SBC324 6U and 3U OpenVPX single board computers based on Intel® Core™ i7 processors – together with support for GE multicore/multithreading hardware platforms based on Power Architecture™ and NVIDIA® CUDA™, AXIS 5.1 provides support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) based high performance interconnects including RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) and InfiniBand. RDMA allows an application running on one computer to directly transfer data into user space memory on another computer, reducing latency by minimizing demands on bandwidth and processing overhead and increasing system throughput.

Other new features provided by Version 5.1 of AXIS include improved Linux functionality to deliver a more familiar, superior Linux® experience; support for GE’s BCS (Background Condition Screening); and improved Windows® capabilities.

“The pressure for military developers to minimize cost and time-to-market has never been greater – yet mission profiles continue to expand for a broad range of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance applications,” said Rod Rice, General Manager, Military/Aerospace Products at GE Intelligent Platforms. “GE’s AXIS development environment addresses those pressing needs, enabling high performance applications to be developed, debugged and delivered in the shortest possible time. The combination of GE’s High Performance Embedded Computing hardware and software provides not only a highly integrated solution, but also one that provides customers with optimum support.”

AXIS comprises three primary modules. AXISView is an integrated graphic user interface for task level application development, while AXISFlow provides a high performance interprocessor communication library for low latency, high throughput data movement between tasks across multiple hardware elements. The third module, AXISLib, includes optimized DSP and math libraries with standard VSIPL APIs targeted at the latest Intel, NVIDIA CUDA and Power Architecture platforms.