BSP with 40 Gbps Ethernet via Wind River VxWorks released by Curtiss-Wright
NewsMarch 20, 2015
ASHBURN, Va. Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions released a new Board Support Package (BSP) to enable 40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) support via the Wind River VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) on rugged OpenVPX commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) modules.
The new BSP has an RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) driver and provides about a 10x improvement in Ethernet performance with VxWorks operating environments. The remote direct memory access (RDMA) driver gets nearly 40 Gbps data throughput (measured at ~38.7 Gbps over a single Ethernet port) and removes the need for mroe components such as a TCP offload engine (TOE) to increase Ethernet performance.
This also reduces processor overhead for Ethernet handling on the host processor to near-zero (~1 %). The new driver is now part of the standard BSP for Curtiss-Wright’s Intel Core™ i7-based CHAMP-AV9 digital signal processing (DSP) engine and is available for the company's VPX6-1958 Single Board Computer (SBC). Using the new BSP allows users to still leverage and reuse their investment in VxWorks software while also maximizing board-to-board data connectivity at performance levels 10x.
The new VxWorks BSP uses the iverbs interface, typically used in the Linux community, to VxWorks applications. New BSP users keep their ability to take advantage of the performance advantages of RoCE and the communications advantages of TCP/UDP, since the RoCE data is packaged and transmitted as standard Ethernet packets. With the new driver, both types of data communications, RoCE and TCP/UDP, may coexist across the same Ethernet pipe. The new RoCE driver is built for use with the Mellanox ConnectX-3 Gigabit Ethernet Network Interface device, which is on the CHAMP-AV9 and VPX6-1958 Fabric40 products.
The CHAMP-AV9 uses the enhanced Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) 2.0 instruction set and has 664 GFLOPS per board, not including the on-chip GPU numerical co-processors. The VPX6-1958 is a rugged, high performance 6U OpenVPX SBC based on the Intel 4th Generation Core i7 processor and each of the Core i7's four cores provides 2.4 GHz of performance.
Curtiss-Wright’s Fabric40 products provide end-to-end system support for 10 and 40 Gbps Ethernet fabrics as well as supporting the full range of IB fabric data rates: 10 Gbps IB SDR; 20 Gbps DDR ; 40 Gbps QDR; and FDR-10.
For more information, visit www.cwcdefense.com.
