UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) continue to play a vital role in executing a variety of mission critical ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) operations, most notably in the areas of target tracking and object recognition.  While camera technology continues to improve, in-flight vibrational issues along the camera’s optic axis create challenges that must be addressed by system software designed to compensate for such movements.

According to a study conducted by the Center for Applied Mathematical Sciences (CAMS) within the University of Southern California, complex algorithms which incorporate adaptive spatial-temporal processing and advanced jitter estimation, compensation and stabilization are required to address sub-pixel translational stabilization (of up to 1-3 percent of a pixel), accurate rotational stabilization (three axis system – roll, pitch and yaw), scaling (with compensation for zooming), and resolution enhancement (accommodating double /triple the resolution).

Northrop Grumman Firebird

Engineered to be a persistent multiple-intelligence gathering air system, Northrop Grumman’s Firebird is a new breed of aircraft system that increases real-time data collection through simultaneous use of multiple intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and communications sensor payloads on a single platform.

Designed for either manned or unmanned flight, the Firebird can be fully provisioned with as many as four High-Definition Full Motion Video (HDFMV) cameras or other sensors providing Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) plus Communications Intelligence (COMINT) capability.

The challenge of image stabilization is just one aspect of real-time image processing subsystems that require the latest high-performance platforms that feature the massively parallel computing power of GPU technology.  As one of NVIDIA’s Tesla Preferred Partners Trenton has been designing platforms, such as the TCS4501 rackmount computer, to address the demanding needs of applications such as image stabilization and digital video processing.

Example using the Ikena software solution from MotionDSP

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rackmount LCD monitors and keyboards designed for military aircraft, ground vehicles, surface ships or submarines need to be compact, lightweight, and most of all, built tough enough to withstand extreme operating environments.  Trenton offers two unique solutions for government & defense programs.

TKM1502 Military-Grade Rugged Rackmount LCD Monitor

The TKM1502 is a rugged rackmount monitor and keyboard that features a watertight NEMA 4 optically bonded 17″ LCD Monitor and NEMA 4X backlighted keyboard with built-in mouse housed in an all-aluminum 1U rackmount enclosure.

The shallow 17″ depth is ideal for transit case applications, in addition to airborne, shipboard and submarine deployments.

Integrating the LCD monitor, full keyboard and mouse simplifies hardware mounting and cable routing issues while the clamshell enclosure design allows for additional rackmount components in space-constrained environments.

The Trenton TKM1503 features a rugged NEMA 4 sealed 17″ LCD display with resistive touchscreen, as well as a backlighted NEMA 4X keyboard.  Utilizing a touchscreen provides operators with the ability to interact directly with elements displayed on the monitor, eliminating tedious keystrokes.

TKM1502 and TKM1503 Features Include:

• Crisp 17″ LCD flat screens with resolutions up to 1280 x 1024
• Wide color range support for up to 16 million colors
• Super bright monitors support 250 NITS cd/m2 with 350:1 contrast ratio
• Fast monitor response times of 5 to 20 (Tr/TF)(ms)
• Space-saving rackmount drawer design built for military deployments

Hardigg MAC Rack Transit Case

Transit case computing is required for many military applications.  Offered in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, this architecture provides critical rackmount computer systems with the level of protection required in extreme field deployments.

Combining the TKM1502 or TKM1503 with a low profile system, such as Trenton’s 2U TRC2002 rugged rackmount computer or MIL-STD-810 certified TMS2700 rackmount military computer, creates a high-performance portable computing solution.

For compute-intensive applications, such as video processing or image stabilization, the TCS4501 rugged rackmount computer features NVIDIA Tesla C20-series GPUs in a shallow 20″ depth enclosure that can accommodate up to eight hot-swap, front-access hard drives and choice of single board computer.

Trenton offers a wide range of rugged and MIL-STD-810 military computing solutions, each one built to your exact specifications and designed to handle adverse shock & vibration, temperature, EMI, dust and high-humidity environments.

Getting the right message, to the right people, at the right time remains one of marketing’s greatest challenges.  Traditional media (television, radio, newspapers, magazines) offer some ability to target customers – think tire ad within an automotive magazine – but to a large degree product promotion often requires a marketing approach aimed at a broad audience, most of whom are not ready to buy.

Intel Intelligent Digital Signage

Digital signage, however, now has the potential of tailoring advertising campaigns based on the customer’s demographics, and do so in real time.

When situated in a retail environment, marketing professionals want to know far more than just a count of people who viewed a particular ad, they also want detailed audience demographics and a way to measure the level of interest.

Anonymous video analytics can discern gender, race and even the viewer’s approximate age by processing millions of pixels per second within a digitized impression of the viewer, as opposed to using real images, keeping data anonymous.

Intel Connected Store Fashion Experience

The Wall Street Journal reported that studies in retail determined a shoppers’ First Moment of Truth to be the 1st 3 to 7 seconds a shopper notices an item on a store shelf.  According to Rajnish Maini, Intel’s marketing manager for digital signage, most operators will consider viewership of 3 to 7 seconds to be effective.

The power of this in-the-moment analysis is that retailers can personalize ads for each customer- a young woman might see a shoe sale ad while an older gentleman might view a special on golf clubs.  Sales feedback at the end of the day can confirm the level of an ad’s effectiveness, which may be used to alter the ad campaign strategy going forward.

For those customers with privacy concerns, the software only has the ability to determine certain facial characteristics and is not able to actually recognize any individual.  Intel has moved to the forefront of this technology with the introduction of their Audience Impression Metric Suite (Intel AIM Suite), giving retailers the ability to tailor screen content based on audience characteristics engagement levels.

So next time you’re out shopping, don’t be surprised if the ads you’re seeing match what you want!

NVIDIA continues to enhance the performance and productivity of GPU computing by releasing a major update to their CUDA parallel computing platform.  The new release features three key enhancements that make parallel programing with GPUs easier, more accessible and faster.

• Re-designed Visual Profiler with automated performance analysis
• New compiler, based on LLVM open-source compiler infrastructure
• Hundreds of new imaging and signal processing functions added

“The new visual profiler is amazing,” said Joshua Anderson, lead developer of the HOOMD-blue open source molecular dynamics project. “With just a few clicks, it performs an automated performance analysis of your application, highlights likely problem areas, and then provides links to best-practice suggestions on improving them. It makes it quick and easy for virtually all developers to accelerate a broad range of applications.”

Screenshot of the New NVIDIA CUDA Visual Profiler

Visual Profiler Feature Set

Focus on the information that matters – Quickly identify potential performance bottleneck issues in your applications using highly configurable tables and graphical views

Automated performance analysis – Perform automated analysis of your application to identify performance bottlenecks and get optimization suggestions that can be used to improve performance

Unified CPU and GPU Timeline – View CUDA activity occurring on both CPU and GPU in a unified time line, including CUDA API calls, memory transfers and CUDA launches.

CUDA and OpenCL API trace – View all memory transfers, kernel launches, and other API functions on the same timeline

Drill down to raw data – Gain low-level insights by looking at performance metrics collected directly from GPU hardware counters and software instrumentation.

Compare results across multiple sessions – Confirm performance improvements by comparing against previous sessions

Analyze data collected from remote systems – Use the command line profiler using environment variables to collect data from multiple systems and analyze the results in Visual Profiler

New Capabilities in the Latest CUDA Platform Release:

Updated Visual Profiler – Easiest path to performance optimization

The new Visual Profiler makes it easy for developers at all experience levels to optimize their code for maximum performance.  Featuring automated performance analysis and an expert guidance system to deliver step-by-step optimization suggestions, the Visual Profiler can identify application performance bottlenecks and recommend actions with links to the optimization guides.  By using the Visual Profiler, performance bottlenecks are easily identified and actionable.

LLVM Compiler – Instant 10 percent increase in application performance

LLVM is a widely-used open-source compiler infrastructure featuring a modular design that makes it easy to add support for new programming languages and processor architectures. Using the new LLVM-based CUDA compiler, developers can achieve up to 10 percent additional performance gains on existing GPU-accelerated applications with a simple recompile. In addition, LLVM’s modular design allows third-party software tool developers to provide a custom LLVM solution for non-NVIDIA processor architectures, enabling CUDA applications to run across NVIDIA GPUs, as well as those from other vendors.

New Image, Signal Processing Library Functions

NVIDIA has doubled the size of its NPP library, with the addition of hundreds of new image and signal processing functions. This enables virtually any developer using image or signal processing algorithms to easily gain the benefit of GPU acceleration, with the simple addition of library calls into their application. The updated NPP library can be used for a wide variety of image and signal processing algorithms, ranging from basic filtering to advanced workflows.

Powerful Trenton GPU computing systems, such as the TCS4501 4U rackmount computer, can support four NVIDIA Tesla C20-series GPUs in critical video processing or government & defense applications.

PCI Express backplanes, designed and manufactured within the United States, have long been a key component in many of Trenton’s industrial, rugged and military rackmount computers.  Featured in a recent post entitled PCI Express Backplanes Enable Powerful System Capabilities, the BP4FS6890 is quite unique in its ability to support four separate computers in one 5U rackmount enclosure!

Trenton Systems BP4FS6890 Four-Segment PCI Express Backplane

The four segments of the BP4FS6890 PCI Express backplane will support any of Trenton’s graphics or server-class PICMG 1.3 system host boards, and each segment can be independently controlled and powered or grouped together.  This PCIe backplane utilizes an independent power source from +12V or standard ATX/EPS power supplies, and an optional on-board 10/100/1000Base-T Ethernet switch enables SHB-to-SHB communication.  The BP4FS6890 is also backed by a five-year factory warranty.

Putting the BP4FS6890 to Work

While this backplane can be found in a variety of 4U, 5U or 6U customer-driven computing solutions, the TRC5003 5U rackmount computer takes full advantage of the BP4FS6890′s ability to support four PICMG 1.3 system host boards as completely independent systems.

Trenton Systems TRC5003 5U Rugged Rackmount Computer

As you can see in the photo above, the TRC5003 features secured front-access to all four hard disk drives in addition to front-access DVDs and USB ports that are dedicated to each of the independent backplane segments.  The image shown below depicts a fully-loaded configuration supported by four rear-access 1U removable power supplies.  The extremely rugged design of the all-aluminum chassis makes this an ideal solution for a wide variety of military and government applications.

Trenton Systems TRC5003 5U Rugged Rackmount Computer Rear View

This white paper on Cluster Computing In Space-Constrained Applications notes the inherent power that these multi-segment configurations provide when used to address the computational needs of military programs such as cryptography analysis or aerial reconnaissance & surveillance.

A chassis with four dual-processor Trenton SHBs can run up to 32 different applications—one for each processor core in the chassis. This means that one 5U rackmount computer, with four dual-processor SHBs, can take the place of sixteen 1U dual processor motherboard systems. Using one 5U enclosure instead of sixteen 1U enclosures reduces rack space by 19.25” (48.90cm)—a nearly 70% savings.

Designed to be the ultimate building block for scalable video wall controllers, graphics processing systems and high-performance GPU computing solutions, the BPG8032 PCI Express 2.0 backplane redefines the world of PICMG 1.3 slot-based servers by maximizing PCI Express I/O expandability.

Trenton Systems BPG8032 Backplane Features Seventeen x16 PCI Express 2.0 Slots

If you’re looking for a scalable video wall controller solution, this backplane will support up to sixteen multi-port video wall controller cards, which can support up to 56 video cubes or LCD monitors when using the JXTS6966 single board computer.  This configuration enables you to start with a few video cards and expand as your video wall requirement grows over time, creating an excellent solution for command & control, traffic management and emergency response centers.

For high-performance GPGPU applications, this backplane supports up to nine NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs for cluster computing applications inside a single 5U, 19″ rackmount computer enclosure when using the TSB7053 single board computer.  Such massively parallel GPU computing power will benefit seismic image analysis, digital image processing, target tracking and video encoding/decoding needs.

Check out these two white papers that highlight the power of advanced video and GPU technology when combined with an exceptional PCI Express 2.0 backplane such as Trenton’s unique BPG8032.

Military Display Systems Leverage PCI Express Backplane Architectures

Carrier Landing Modeling System Leverages GPGPU Advantages

Featuring innovative 24-port/96-lane PCIe Gen 2 switches that reduce data transfer latency, long-life 7+ year product availability, and a five-year factory warranty, the BPG8032 is ideal for any demanding communications, video processing or government / defense program.

Entering a new year is traditionally a time for reflecting on the past twelve months, yet also a time for envisioning progress in the coming twelve.  At Trenton we experienced a banner year, rolling out new products, expanding into new markets, and driving company growth despite a tough economy.

Maintaining our systems engineering focus, Trenton released a wide range of American-made solutions throughout 2011, each designed to meet the needs of our customer’s most demanding applications.  In case you missed one, the list below provides a recap of some memorable product announcements.

Product Release Highlights

• Compact 2U Rackmount Video Wall Controller Drives 8 Cubes
• TRC2004 High-Performance 2U Rackmount Server
• Trenton Introduces 3-Panel 2U Rackmount LCD Monitor
• Low-Profile Shelfmount Video Wall Controller
• Matrox Validates Trenton’s TVC4403 Video Wall Controller
• Trenton TCS1502 – Impressive Storage – Impressive Power
• 2U Dual Rackmount LCD Monitor Doubles Viewing Area
• Trenton TSB7053 Features Intel Sandy Bridge Processors
• TRC2005 Rackmount Computer For SWaP, Storage, Reliability
• Military Computers Built Rugged From The Inside Out

What can you expect for 2012?  As you know, Trenton is a company that never rests on its laurels, and that means another round of high-performance customer-driven solutions in the coming year, including an advanced PICMG 1.3 PCI Express Gen 2 backplane with seventeen x16 slots, a new dual-processor PICMG 1.3 system host board, additional video wall controllers with expanded capability, and a number of integrated computer systems targeted at demanding government & defense,  industrial automation and GPU computing applications.

Let Trenton design a customer-driven computing solution for your next project!

From humble beginnings in 1992 at Intel’s Architecture Development Lab, PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus architecture has remained on a continuous path of evolution.  Just six years after its introduction, IBM, HP, and Compaq submitted the PCI-X (PCI-eXtended) specification for approval, and in 2003 PCI-SIG introduced PCIe 1.0a, with a data rate of 250 MB/s and transfer rate of 2.5 GT/s.

PCIe 1.1 came along in 2005, and in 2007 PCIe 2.0 raised the performance bar yet again by doubling PCIe 1.0′s transfer rate up to 5 GT/s while increasing per-lane throughput from 250 MB/s to 500 MB/s.  Along the way Trenton developed a variety of backplanes in support of the PCI revolution and offers a range of PCI Express backplanes to serve demanding data acquisition, GPU computing and multimedia applications, such as medical imaging, video processing and video display walls.

Multi-Segment backplanes can host 2, 4 or 6 single board computers in one rackmount enclosure

TRC5000

BP2S6929

BP4FS6890

BP6FS6605

Single-Segment 20-slot backplanes offer a diverse range of PCIe, PCI-X, PCI & ISA slot options

TRC6001

BPX6806

BPX6571

BP3/16-64

Single-Segment 14-slot backplanes support power supply options in 4U rackmount computers

TRC4008

BPG7087

BPC7041

BPC7009

As you can see from the above matrix, which represents only a fraction of Trenton’s product offerings, our combination of standard designs and exceptional engineering talent can create a customer-driven solution that meets your exact needs – from commercial-off-the-shelf to custom configurations.

For further information on PCI Express, including specifications on the new 3.0 generation, check out our previous blog post on the topic: PCIe 3.0, PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 1.1 interface differences.

When talking about the latest advances in unmanned vehicle technology we often imagine an aerial representation, such as the new Northrop Grumman X-47B, but a great deal of research is going into unmanned undersea vehicles.  One such program seeks to develop a Large Displacement Unmanned Undersea Vehicle, or LDUUV, and the U.S. Navy has already tested an unmanned submarine that can maintain surveillance of key stretches of water.

One device in development, called “Sea Maverick”, was designed by the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University.  Tests of the prototype have been conducted near Key West by the Joint Interagency Task Force South, an interagency task force that is focused on the detection and monitoring of suspected air and maritime counter illicit activity, with very promising results.

Sea Maverick Testing in Key West Florida - Photo credit - U.S. Southern Command

The Sea Maverick, with a reported price tag of $5 million, runs on batteries, providing the dual benefit of relatively silent operation and reduced environmental impact as a result of eliminating exhaust gas emissions.  At 30 feet in length, and just 4 feet in diameter with twin conning towers, the vessel was tethered to a support ship during initial tests while communicating via its onboard WiFi network.

The LDUUV is a pier-launched and recovered UUV (without the need for ship-launch or recovery) with the capability to transit in the open ocean and conduct over-the-horizon missions in littoral waters.

What are the long term goals of the project?  LDUUVs are designed to operate in a semi-autonomous fashion, similar to the unmanned drones now used by the military in the Middle East, and while current plans do not include an armed version, the device will be capable of housing a wide range of cameras and surveillance equipment.  We’ve previously written about the advantages of persistent surveillance monitoring from the air, and the advent of LDUUVs will bring a similar capability to the world’s oceans.

Uses for the Sea Maverick, and similar systems, are wide ranging, from ongoing military operations to homeland security and drug smuggling interdiction.  Such devices can be controlled via nearby ships, as well as from remote command & control centers, enhancing their versatility and effectiveness.

Trenton will continue to monitor progress in the development of unmanned undersea vehicles as our systems engineering approach to designing military-grade computing systems supports applications involving tactical and/or surveillance needs within the government & defense industry.

Intending to increase the efficiency of writing parallel code, NVIDIA, Cray, The Portland Group and CAPS enterprise recently announced OpenACC, a new open parallel programming standard targeting millions of scientific and technical programmers wanting to tap into the power of CPU/GPU computing systems.

Programming professionals performing research in industries as diverse as chemistry, biology, physics, analytics, weather and intelligence stand to benefit from this new paradigm which allows them to take advantage of “directives” – simple hints which expose parallelism to the compiler, instead of having to modify existing code, as the compiler will take care of mapping the computation onto the accelerator.

The added beauty of this approach lies in the fact that the code base is compatible across platforms from multiple vendors, taking advantage of the time and money spent developing legacy programs.  How powerful is this new programming model?  Developers are reporting performance gains ranging from 2X to 10X in as little as two weeks.

For example, a global manufacturer of navigation systems wanted to speed up its research involving algorithms for real-time object detection in image sequences.  Using a combination of directives and NVIDIA GPUs, they were able to accelerate their production application by 5x in just one week.

A postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at San Antonio is on a mission to better understand the effects of solvents on proteins and accelerated his application 5x in a single day.

“People are sometimes afraid to try GPUs, but once they try them out, they realize it’s much easier than they initially expected.” – NVIDIA’s Sumit Gupta

“OpenACC represents a major development for the scientific community,” said Jeffrey Vetter, joint professor in the Computational Science and Engineering School of the College of Computing at Georgia institute of Technology. “Programming models for open science by definition need to be flexible, open and portable across multiple platforms; OpenACC is well designed to fill this need. It provides a valuable new tool to empower the vast numbers of domain scientists who could benefit from application acceleration, but who may not have the funding or expertise to port their code to emerging architectures.”

Assisting Military Applications

As you may recall, NVIDIA was selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to participate in the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program and prototype systems are due by 2018.  In the coming years a combination of UHPC and OpenACC could serve to accelerate the operational capability of our intelligence agencies and all branches of the Armed Forces.

The UHPC program aims to develop computer systems, from embedded to cabinet level, which have extremely high energy efficiency and are dependable and easily programmable. These systems will have dramatically reduced power consumption while delivering a thousand-fold increase in processing capabilities.

With a wide range of mission critical government and defense applications such as pattern recognition, video processing and stabilization, cryptography, sensor fusion, target tracking and flight simulation in need of the significant performance enhancements provided by GPU Computing, Trenton continues to develop integrated rackmount computers based on our strategic partnership with NVIDIA.

During a recent trip to Europe I was impressed by the creative use of digital signage within some of the London Underground stations.  While the majority of presented information employed a range of print formats, in either static or rotating displays, the push is on to implement digital technology in a fashion not possible with traditional paper posters.  Two examples stood out in that regard.

Implementing a “live poster” approach, Channel 4 News is taking advantage of cross track projectors (XTPs) as a way to market their 7pm news bulletins.  Run during the peak of the afternoon commuter rush, headlines from the evening news are highlighted, enticing riders to tune in once they get home.

“This is a great campaign and really showcases how the digital cross-track format can bring campaigns to life and engage the London Underground audience,” says country director at CBS Outdoor Jason Cotterrell. “Timely updates like this are a fantastic way for Channel 4 to reach a key audience at a key time of day.”

In a more encompassing style, an ad campaign from JCDecaux, promoting the Range Rover Evoque, made quite a splash at the Euston railway station.  The installation included an escalator wrap as well as e-motion digital screens inside the station, with the car appearing to drive alongside the escalators as they descended into the Underground level, making the brand visible at every turn.

“Land Rover is using London’s newest media space at Euston to create a fully immersive campaign that will reach 175,000 people every day – exactly the people who are in the market for a new car,” said Spencer Berwin, managing director – sales at JCDecaux. “It’s fantastic to see a brand making the very best use of the creative opportunities of this new Outdoor space to create a piece of retail theatre.”

The video below gives you a feel for just how enveloping the Land Rover ad campaign was:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Trenton continues to create new and innovative computing platforms, such as the Matrox-validated TVC2401 rackmount video wall controller, based on Matrox Mura MPX Series video controller boards, that are ideal for video display walls or digital signage applications in commercial spaces, as well as government & defense environments such as command and control centers.

With some 336 exhibitors consuming over 266,000 square feet of exhibit hall, the 24th edition of SC11 definitely impressed the record-setting crowd of 11,300 who came from corporations, universities and research labs around the world.  EE Times covered the event and put together this highlight video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SC11 Technology Announcements

IBM unveils its next generation Blue Gene/Q (BGQ) supercomputer, sporting 16 multi-processing core technology and performance up to 100 petaflops.

Intel was showing off its 22-nm “Knight’s Corner” co-processor compute accelerator – with over 50 cores the chip delivers one teraflops of double precision floating point performance.

NVIDIA, Cray, The Portland Group and CAPS unveil ‘OpenACC’, a programming initiative the firms hope will beome a standard for parallel computing.

450 Gigabit Capacity Network Deployed

While most of the attendee’s attention remained focused on the latest developments in the world of supercomputing, one of the greatest achievements of the entire SC conference is the network that’s built each year to support this annual collection of high performance computing marvels.  Known as SCinet, more than 150 engineers from industry, academia and government institutions volunteered their time during the year preceeeding SC11 to design and construct a massive network backbone using over $27 million in equipment donated from vendors around the world.

“In 2011, SCinet will for the first time connect multiple 100 Gbps circuits in collaboration with leading research networks including Internet2, the Department of Energy’s ESnet, National LambdaRail, and CANARIE who are donating this bandwidth to support the conference. In total, SCinet will deliver more than 450 Gigabits per second in total capacity to the Washington State Convention Center (WSCC).”

Start planning for SC12 – November 10th to 16th, 2012 in Salt Lake City

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stay tuned for upcoming GPU Computing news on a new Trenton system that will support twice as many NVIDIA Tesla GPU processors as our current TCS4501 4U rackmount GPU computing system!

While news stories often feature extreme video wall installations utilizing dozens of LCD panels, most corporate board rooms, security surveillance centers and shipboard command & control centers require far fewer screens, and Trenton’s TVC2401 video wall controller, which has been validated by Matrox to support one or two Mura MPX Series controller boards, is ideal in such applications.

TVC2401 2U Rackmount Video Wall Controller

Powered by a Trenton JXTS6966 single board computer and PCI Express 2.0 butterfly backplane, this 2U rackmount video wall controller can drive an eight-cube video display wall in 1080p high-definition while taking full advantage of the Mura card’s PowerDesk Edge Overlap capability.

“Matrox is pleased to extend its partnership with Trenton by validating the new Mura MPX-enabled TVC2401 video controller system,” said Helgi Sigurdsson, Product Manager, Matrox Graphics Inc. “This compact controller solution supports up to 2 Mura boards, the TVC2401’s architecture leverages Mura’s high-performance display controller board technology so AV integrators, installers, and other professionals can deploy fully-integrated hardware systems for small to mid-sized display walls in a variety of control room environments.”

Measuring 2U in height with a depth of just 18″, this lightweight rugged aluminum enclosure weighs less than 25 pounds, yet includes three 80mm front-mounted 67CFM fans to ensure optimal thermal characteristics, supports up to four front-access 2.5″ SATA hard drives for critical data storage, and features a 2U fixed rear-mounted 650W ATX/EPS power supply.

The TVC2401 is the latest addition to Trenton’s full line of video wall controllers that serve an array of industries, including government & defense, industrial automation and energy distribution.

The science of telemetry, which involves the remote collection of sensor data with transmission to a central point for further processing, has been around for over 250 years, and virtually every industry has adopted its use, from process manufacturing to energy transmission, water management, space exploration and military intelligence.  The first implementations based on a simple one-to-one design (single sensor to one collection point) gave rise to many-to-one constructs (utilizing sensor arrays) and ultimately many-to-many networks with the advent of machine-to-machine technology (M2M).
Intel’s M2M Ecosystem of Smart Services, pictured in the image above, illustrates the expansion from what was once an industrial domain to now encompass both commercial and residential landscapes.  How big is this technology revolution?  According to Kevin Johnson, director of embedded connected devices at Intel, industry analysts are predicting there may be 150 million M2M connections by 2014, and as many as 50 billion connected devices in operation by 2020.

This radical transformation in computing architecture is being driven by a number of diverse factors, most notably the proliferation of inexpensive intelligent devices, the rapid development of modern sensor applications, and the pervasive nature of wireless networks connected to cloud computing.

Creating a More Efficient Economy

So what’s the true practical implication of this boom in machine-to-machine communication capability?  The energy industry is often mentioned, as a wide range of efficiencies have been identified within the exploration, production & transmission processes, as well as energy usage patterns in both home and industrial environments.  What’s different today is the increased level of measurement, immediacy of both data collection and analysis, and the abilty to make changes in real time.

“In this Internet of Things, devices, systems, and machines don’t only communicate with humans; they also communicate with each other. And they can generate an enormous volume of data about all kinds of things: temperature, GPS position, speed, humidity, vibration, altitude, and so on.” – from Brian Vezza, director of M2M solutions, Wind River

Trenton’s continued development of advanced board level products and configured systems, such as our JXM7031 dual processor MicroATX embedded motherboard, TRC2004 2U rackmount computer or TSC3600 shelfmount computer, facilitates this new computing paradigm by providing our customers with high quality, long-life solutions designed for critical government & defense, telecommunication, industrial automation and energy industry applications.

Not that long ago Petascale computing was just a dream, a goal the world of supercomputing aspired to achieve at some point  (one petaflop equals one quadrillion floating point operations per second), but with the introduction of Japan’s K Supercomputer, that goal has been surpassed ten times over.

Fujitsu's K (Kei Soku Keisanki) Supercomputer

Not only are each of today’s top ten supercomputers all rated above one petaflop in performance, but Fujitsu’s K Computer is slated to surpass 10 petaflops when it’s completed in 2012.  Even in its current state of development, the K Computer is performing three times faster than the previous leader in the field, China’s Tianhe-1A Supercomputer.

As of today, the current top 10 supers are:

• 8.16 petaflops, K Computer, Japan
• 2.57 petaflops, Tianhe-1A, China
• 1.76 petaflops, Jaguar, United States
• 1.27 petaflops, Nebulae, China
• 1.19 petaflops, TSUBAME 2.0, Japan
• 1.11 petaflops, Cielo, United States
• 1.08 petaflops, Pleiades, United States
• 1.05 petaflops, Hopper, United States
• 1.05 petaflops, Tera-100, France
• 1.04 petaflops, Roadrunner, United States

To illustrate how fast supercomputing technology has advanced in recent years, the last time Japan held the crown of fastest supercomputing was when the Earth Simulator held the number one spot from 2002 to 2004; that computer only delivered 35 teraflops, a level of performance that wouldn’t even make the top 500 list today!  And for those of you who may be wondering which computer first surpassed one petaflop, it’s the IBM Roadrunner, which is barely hanging on to the number ten spot.

IBM's Roadrunner Supercomputer

So what’s on tap in the coming months?  By the end of the year NCSA’s Power7-based Blue Waters system should be online, surpassing the 10-petaflop mark, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Blue Gene/Q Sequoia supercomputer is hoping to achieve 20 petaflops when it’s deployed in 2012.

Rack space is often at a premium, especially when it comes to airborne, shipboard and ground-vehicle military applications.  These environments also tend to be sensitive to size, weight and power (SWaP) restrictions, so packing as much power within a compact, lightweight and rugged enclosure is critical.

In addition to Defense Applications, a range of industries, from Communications, Test & Measurement and Industrial Automation, also require stable, long life cycle computing platforms with 7+ year product availability and unsurpassed technical support, which is why Trenton designed a 2U rackmount server that incorporated the following features:

• Compact rackmount server that supports multiple front access hard drives
• Short 18″ depth 2U aluminum enclosure with 3 front-mounted 80mm fans
• Dual and single-processor MicroATX embedded motherboard options
• Diverse PCI Express Gen2 and low-profile option card configurations
• 1U removable 400W ATX/EPS or 2U fixed 650W ATX/EPS power supply

Trenton's TRC2004 2U Rackmount Server

Trenton’s TRC2004 2U rackmount computer answers the need for dual-processor performance and long-life motherboard stability inside a small, lightweight, yet rugged rackmount computer enclosure. At the heart of the TRC2004 system is a Trenton JXM7031 embedded motherboard, which features either one or two CPUs and support a variety of dual and quad-core Intel Xeon processors.

Top View With JXM7031 MicroATX Embedded Motherboard

“The TRC2004 meets a critical need for system performance in a lightweight enclosure that’s tough enough to withstand the rigors of both defense and industrial applications”, stated Michael Bowling, president of Trenton Systems.  “Combining a long-life embedded motherboard, backed by a five-year factory warranty, with flexible low-profile option card support and high data storage capacity options serves to maximize system performance in crucial embedded computing applications.”

Download the TRC2004 Chassis Drawing, Product Datasheet or Computer Configuration Details for further information on this high-performance computing platform.

Every facet of the economy has been looking for ways to more efficiently use our planet’s resources, from using less material during the manufacturing process, to ensuring that a high percentage of all material is recyclable and the amount of energy consumed during manufacture and use is minimized.

In support of those objectives, the InfoComm Board of Directors authorized the formation of a new Green AV Task Force in 2009 with the mission of creating a body of knowledge and associated best practices as to how the AV industry could become more Green.  Subsequent to that initial endeavor, the AV Sustainability Task Force, with representation from AV manufacturing, integration, consulting, software programming and the technology manager communities, was formed.

The result of their hard work: creation of the Sustainable Technology Environments Program (STEP) in a strategic industry partnership with CompTIA, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the Building Industry Consulting Service International (BICSI).

“STEP will finally provide pro AV consultants, designers, integrators, and owners with a clear, concise, and mutually beneficial method for reducing the carbon footprint of AV equipment, installation practices, and system use.” Brian Huff, CTS-D, LEED AP, from Systems Contractor News, June 2011

While STEP uses a different approach from the U.S. Green Building Council‘s globally recognized LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, the systems do work well in tandem, as a high percentage of the 32,000+ LEED registered projects within the U.S. will contain some amount of  AV equipment throughout their facilities, from auditoriums to video walls and digital signage.

Contra Costa Courthouse Designed by HOK - Photo Courtesy of HOK

The East Contra Costa County Courthouse provides an example of implementing Green AV technology by way of empirically calculating just how much can be saved with a valid Green AV systems design.

The actual assessment of the ROI was accomplished by measuring the energy draw, in watts, on the system when it was in a fully on state, then measuring the differences in power draw as each of the components would go into standby mode, and finally into a fully off state.  The calculations also took into account predictable periodic activity breaks during the court day schedule during which equipment would have otherwise stayed on. – Green Leadership by Dan Daley, Sound & Video Contractor

In a future post we’ll talk about how high-density computing platforms, based on PCI Express 2.0 backplane technology, maximize compute and I/O capability while minimizing required rack space.

Members of the AV Sustainability Task Force:

• Scott Walker, CTS-D, LEED® AP, Waveguide (Chair)
• Clint Childress, Draper Inc.
• Rick Cooper, CTS, Spinitar
• Alain Durocher, University of Southern California
• Gary Hall, CTS-D, CTS-I, Cisco
• Brian Huff, CTS-D, LEED® AP, Acentech Inc.
• Raymond Kent, CTS, Westlake Reed Leskosky
• William Lally, Mode: Green
• Howard Nunes, CTS, PepperDash
• David Rogers, Compass Group
• Byron Tarry, CTS, LEED® AP, AVW TELAV
• David Wilts, LEED AP BD+C, Crestron Electronics

Click on Image for PDF Version

Rackmount LCD monitors have long been used to satisfy broadcast, telecom, industrial automation and military applications, but despite the evolution of LCD panel size, from 14″ in the early days, up to 15″, then 17″ and finally 19″, the cry for more monitor real estate has continued.  In an effort to satisfy this insatiable desire for more pixels, Trenton has introduced the TMM3500 2U rackmount LCD Monitor with three 17″ active matrix LCD panels.

Trenton's Three-Panel TMM3500 2U Rackmount LCD Monitor

Due to the increased number of video feeds and critical information present in many C4ISR programs, such as airborne surveillance, UAV ground control stations or command & control centers, maximizing screen area while reducing size, weight and power (SWaP) is a much desired combination.

TMM3500 Key Features

• Three 17″ LCD monitors in a shallow 20″ depth 2U drawer
• Monitor resolution up to 1920 x 1200 pixels (WUXGA)
• Secure monitor mounitng and stabilization features
• High contrast ratio (450:1) & wide viewing angle (up to 80°)
• Rugged yet lightweight all-aluminum enclosure

Designed for a variety of installations, the TMM3500 features 3 sets of video connectors, including: HDMI (wHDCP), Analog RGB (D-15 VGA), DVI-D, S-Video, CVS, YPbPR, Optional HD-SDI input 4:2:2 via SDI & 4:4:4 3G SDI, SDI Loop Out and Audio (L & R, PC and Speaker) connectors.

“LCD rackmount display monitors are critical in military and rackmount computer installations, but finding suitable mounting locations can be problematic”, said Michael Bowling, President of Trenton Systems. “Transit cases and other mobile applications, system installations on submarines and in airborne surveillance aircraft, telecom and industrial automation control room facilities will all enjoy the space efficiency gains provided by Trenton’s TMM3500 three-screen LCD rackmount monitor.”

The TMM3500 is ideal for deployment in: Government & Defense, Communications, Medical Imaging and Industrial Automation applications, and if you’re not that hungry for pixels at the moment, then check out Trenton’s full line of rackmount LCD monitors, in both single and dual-panel configurations.

The success of most emerging technologies becomes apparent in two ways: physically and financially.  With regards to the digital signage industry, the physical aspect is increasingly evident wherever you happen to go, as digital signage can be found inside of schools, shopping centers and entertainment venues.  From a financial perspective, measured in dollars, whenever industry revenue that was once counted in the millions is now measured in the billions, one can say industry success has arrived.

“The global market for digital signage, including displays, media players, software, and installation & maintenance costs, will grow from nearly $1.3 billion in 2010 to almost $4.5 billion in 2016.” – courtesy ABI Research

And what’s driving this explosive growth?  The sharing of up-to-the-minute information is one factor, witnessed by the expansion of digital signage within venues such as airports, but advertising, which ultimately translates into increased revenue/profit, has become a driving factor in the marketplace.

“Digital place-based media’s strong showing during the first half of 2011 follows a 25% growth rate for the sector – to an estimated $1.1 billion – in 2010.” – Digital Place-Based Advertising Association

According to the DPAA, digital place-based advertising increased by 16.1% during the first half of 2011, outpacing Cable TV advertising (up 11.8%), internet advertising (up 10.4%) and national newspapers (down 4.9%) in the same period.

Digital place-based advertising is a relatively new sector within the advertising industry that logically developed in tandem with the hardware (digital signage) side of the business.  Modeled around the concept of the “active consumer”, the idea is to catch people at their “maximum point of influence” – when they’re out shopping or attending a live event, instead of just sitting on the couch watching an advertisement on television in “passive consumer” mode.

“In an economic environment where every single ad dollar must work double-time, digital place-based is emerging as a highly desired media choice because of its ability to engage consumers on the go,” said Mike DiFranza, president of Captivate Network and DPAA chairman. “More and more advertisers recognize digital place-based as a highly effective medium that connects with the consumer who cannot easily be reached with television.”

Based on our strategic partnership with Matrox Graphics, featuring the Mura MPX Series video cards, Trenton has developed a full line of Matrox validated video wall controllers that not only address the critical needs of video wall applications such as military command & control centers, but also serve as robust, long-life computing platforms designed to drive a diverse range of digital signage installations.

The advent of smartphones has forever changed the way in which we communicate, from voice to text & email, to web browsing and social media, but are we ready for the introduction of a “smartwatch”?  Launched as a brand of Blue Sky Srl, i’mWatch will be introducing their vision of this innovative idea in less than a month at the ARM® Technology Conference – TechCon 2011 – in Santa Clara.

While the company doesn’t market it as such, this invention sure sounds like a modern day version of the venerable Dick Tracy wristwatch.  Debuting in 1946 as a 2-Way Wrist Radio, and later upgraded to a 2-Way Wrist TV in 1964, this comic book technology marvel became an instant icon that served as a template for much of today’s mobile electronics, so if you’re an engineer into gadgets, you want one!

Click here to view the embedded video.

“We are convinced that man has something inborn, intangible but truly unique and grand: creativity, fantasy, capability of conceiving brilliant ideas and the drive of wanting to realise them.  We did it and tried to do it in the best of ways. That is to say, we have extrapolated an innovative and high-tech idea and aroused in ourselves a fundamental that excels in the Italian spirit: creative design.  Our philosophy is to make what surrounds us not only more useful but even more beautiful. What we were waiting for is now here: i’mWatch” – May 2011, Manuel Zanella & Massimiliano Bertolini, inventors of i’m Watch

According to reports, this is an Android-based wristwatch/computer that can connect to the internet via a bluetooth connection to the user’s smartphone and runs applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype.  While the display is a color LCD, you’ll have to get used to the screen which measures a scant 1.54-inches diagonally.  The company claims you can use common touch, drag, swipe and pinch movements within the apps, but that may be a tough task with such limited display real estate.

Nevertheless, this may just become the ultimate embedded electronic device for engineers!