Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division today announced the highest performance member of its industry-leading family of Parvus DuraCOR mission computers. The growing sophistication of defense and aerospace sensor payloads demands that mission computers deployed on air, land and maritime platforms have the processing power, memory capacity, and I/O flexibility needed to keep pace with huge quantities of data. Adding to this challenge is the need to deliver ultra-rugged mission computer capability in the smallest, lightest envelope possible. Curtiss-Wright’s new size, weight and power (SWaP) optimized DuraCOR XD1500 Mission Computer delivers powerful 12-core Intel® Xeon®-class floating-point processing supported with the highest capacity memory architecture available. Even better, the DuraCOR XD1500 provides unmatched I/O and data storage scalability (multi-Terabytes of removable NVMe and/or fixed SATA3 Flash disk storage) in a rugged small form factor embedded system. Designed for use in commercial and military platforms that require compliance to MIL-STD-810G, MIL-STD-461F, MIL-STD-704F, MIL-STD-1275D, RTCA/DO-160, and CE Mark, the unit’s passive natural convection-cooled chassis enables fanless operation over extended temperatures with no active cooling, airflow, or cold plate accessories required. The DuraCOR XD1500’s combination of SWaP-optimization and data-center server-class processing and I/O flexibility make it uniquely ideal for a wide range of deployed C4ISR command and control, image processing, surveillance, virtual machine hypervisor, datacenter server processing, and network functional virtualization (NFV) applications.
The DuraCOR XD1500 notably ranks as Curtiss-Wright’s lowest SWaP and most cost-competitive mission computer delivering server-class performance, thanks in part to its innovative use of Intel SoC, DDR4 memory, and standards-based COM-Express, XMC, and Mini-PCIe module technology. The unit is the first COM-Express-based mission computer on the market to support up to 128GB of RAM memory. Thanks to its Xeon-D processor architecture, the DuraCOR XD1500 triples the number of processor cores available on a Parvus DuraCOR system from four to twelve. To ensure superior signal integrity of its high speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0 and other interfaces, the unit is Curtiss-Wright’s first COTS subsystem to feature MIL-grade VITA 76 connectors, which provide a rugged high-bandwidth I/O interconnect packaged in a rugged MIL-38999 circular connector format.
The high compute power delivered by the highly flexible DuraCOR XD1500 line replaceable unit (LRU) can be further expanded with an open architecture co-processor and/or I/O modules, thanks to its on-board XMC and Mini-PCIe expansion slots. Add-on cards can be integrated to support XMC GPU, FPGA, SBC, or additional 10G Ethernet NICs, while multiple Mini-PCIe I/O modules can be integrated for demanding mission requirements, such as MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 429, CANbus, or 1G Ethernet avionics/vetronics payload interfaces.
The DuraCOR XD1500 complements Curtiss-Wright’s previously announced “Skylake” Xeon-based DuraCOR 8043 and “Broadwell” Core® i7-based DuraCOR 8042 modular mission computers, as well as ultra-small form factor (USFF) DuraCOR 310 (iMX6 ARM), DuraCOR 311 (“Baytrail” Atom®) and DuraCOR 312 (NVIDIA® TX2 ARM) mission computers.
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