OREANDA-NEWS. September 12, 2012. GE Intelligent Platforms (NYSE: GE) today announced its HPEC Application Ready Platforms (HARP) product family at the IEEE HPEC Conference (Westin Hotel, Waltham, MA). These new systems respond to government and defense organization demands to acquire and deploy high performance, open architecture, embedded computing solutions at lower cost in shorter timeframes. They deliver application-ready, COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) platforms that can reduce development time from months to weeks or days.

System integrators can develop, test and demonstrate this platform confident that its constituent elements – single board computers, multiprocessors, GPGPU, switched fabric modules, etc. - can be re-packaged in a range of rugged build levels for airborne, ground and naval applications. GE’s platforms provide modular open system architectures (MOSA) platforms based on industry standard high performance computing (HPC) hardware and software building blocks to accelerate time to solution and time to deployment. The first member of the new family is the 6U OpenVPX HPEC Starter System.

Included with each system is GE’s AXIS application development framework, which shortens time to solution and reduces risk and cost by providing a user friendly interface to the scalable multi-processor platform. Application developers can become productive faster by using preconfigured DSP examples and performance libraries to harness the full potential of the underlying hardware. In addition, customers can move blade server or HPC desk top applications onto the systems with minimal risk and delay.

Development time is also reduced by the availability of support and training from GE’s recently-opened HPEC Center of Excellence, which provides in-depth expertise in supporting customers in the design and testing of advanced, high performance systems.

“High performance embedded computing systems are key to expanding Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities across a broad spectrum of deployed systems and across multiple government agencies,” said Rod Rice, General Manager, Military & Aerospace Products at GE Intelligent Platforms. “ISR systems need to be highly flexible and adaptable. MOSA systems harness a wide and diverse talent pool of software developers, data processing skill sets and data analysis techniques to respond to these fast moving landscapes, allowing new applications to be developed, demonstrated and deployed at lower cost and in shorter timeframes.”

The new HARP systems can be used to demonstrate technology readiness to Level 6 when integrated into the end user system environment prior to full integration, test and qualification of the production platforms. They are capable of meeting the most demanding size, weight and power (SWaP) targets for the deployed platform.