Intelligent 4-Way GPU Advanced Switching Bridge Chip for Simulation and Scene Generation

The Crossfield simulator will significantly increase the MDA's ability to evaluate a missile defense systems' effectiveness without conducting expensive field tests and will enable faster development of anti-missile systems. The simulator uses clusters of high-performance Central Processor Units (CPUs) and Graphic Processor Units (GPUs) to generate realistic scenes in real-time, and the generated scenes are fed out through electro-optic interface modules interconnected by a low-latency, ultra-high-throughput PCI Express Advanced Switching (AS) fabric. The CPUs support a wide range of fixed-point and floating-point algorithms, and include very high performance vector processors. The GPU internal pipelines are optimized for stream computing, and provide exceptionally high floating-point performance for selected algorithms. GPUs from NVIDIA, ATI and others are becoming increasingly versatile in the types of algorithms they can effectively support, however, while maintaining a significant performance advantage over general-purpose CPUs. Crossfield proposes to develop an intelligent 4-way GPU AS bridge chip to tightly couple clusters of GPUs to an AS fabric. The integrated circuit will include local switching and memory resources configured to support the GPU stream computing paradigm.