Designed to Manage Massive Thermal Loads
Mercury Systems announced on 26 January the release of its next generation of rugged edge servers that will accelerate compute-intensive edge workloads and drive faster insights for critical aerospace and defence missions.
Featuring 4th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors – formerly known as Sapphire Rapids – the servers build on decades of heritage in Mercury’s COTS Rugged Edge Server (RES) rackmount family. The new RES X08 servers support low-latency PCIe 5.0 fabrics, powerhouse NVIDIA H100 GPUs, 400 Gbps network cards, high-speed DDR5 memory, and versatile Compute Express Link (CXL) expansion in an ultra-rugged, highly configurable chassis. Designed from the ground up to dissipate massive thermal loads created by larger and more powerful components, Mercury’s innovative, secure design delivers higher computational performance in a smaller footprint, optimised for accelerated workloads in demanding applications.
The proliferation of sensors on aerospace and defence platforms has created a tsunami of data that must be processed and exploited in real-time, using sensor fusion, AI and high-performance computing (HPC) technologies, to gain a situational awareness advantage. But insights derived are often bottlenecked by outdated computing infrastructure that does not adequately allow data to flow seamlessly between peripheral devices and the CPU. Besides compute and network performance, modern edge servers must also support seamless integration into retrofit platforms, extended lifecycles, manufacturing to high AS9100 quality standards, and validation testing for extreme environmental conditions.
“The RES X08 follows in the lineage of field-proven RES X07 and RES X06 servers that meet the demanding requirements of mission-critical workloads at the edge,” stated Brian Perry, General Manager of Mercury’s Sensor Systems business unit. “Tens of thousands of Mercury rugged servers are currently deployed across U.S. and international defense programs, and Mercury is proud to make the latest commercial Silicon Valley technologies profoundly more accessible to aerospace and defense customers.”
RES X08 delivers significant performance improvements over prior-generation technology:
- 50% increased CPU core count
- 6x greater GPU performance
- 50% increased memory bandwidth
- 2x faster PCIe throughput
- 2x faster optical networking
- 5x faster NVMe data storage speeds
- 5x increase in total compute capability per rack unit
- 15% improved power efficiency
