Mercury Computer Systems helps IBM bring game-changing technology to market fast.

Published on: 25 Jul 2006

"What we've done is conduct truly joint R&D that resulted in the launch of multiple products in the span of less than a year. That's not an easy thing to pull off, and we couldn't have done it without ITCS to bring it all together." - Joel Radford, VP of Strategic Marketing and Alliances, Mercury Computer Systems

Customer:  Mercury Computer Systems Deployment Country:  Massachusetts - USA Industry:  Computer Services Solution:  Business-to-Business, Business Performance Transformation, Innovation that matters, On Demand Business

Having led the development of the groundbreaking Cell BE processor, IBM wanted to unleash its potential in new markets. Business need: To bring solutions to market fast, IBM needed to effectively meld its world-class technological capabilities with the strong market knowledge of a specialised solutions provider. Solution: IBM Technology Collaboration Services brought IBM together with Mercury Computer Systems in a collaborative development effort that led to the creation of three new products in less than one year. Benefits: • Faster time to market through collaborative R&D and reuse of intellectual property assets • Improved resource utilisation by virtue of the ability to focus on core expertise

"What we've done is conduct truly joint R&D that resulted in the launch of multiple products in the span of less than a year. That's not an easy thing to pull off, and we couldn't have done it without ITCS to bring it all together." -Joel Radford, VP of Strategic Marketing and Alliances, Mercury Computer Systems Based in Chelmsford, MA, Mercury Computer Systems offers component-level and system-level solutions that span hardware, software, silicon IP, services and systems.

On Demand Business defined
"An enterprise whose business processes—integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers—can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat."

In 2000, IBM was approached by the consumer electronics giants Sony and Toshiba to co-develop a radically new chip architecture that would provide the foundation for a quantum improvement in performance for a wide range of consumer applications. Among the most prominent–and demanding–devices targeted were gaming consoles, from which consumers have come to expect an increasingly realistic experience. To deliver this performance, IBM and its partners followed an innovative development approach that in essence brought supercomputing capabilities into the realm of compact devices. The result was the revolutionary IBM Cell Broadband Engine™ (BE) processor, with the capacity of 200 billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPs), nearly 50 times that of the latest Pentium 4 processor. Based on IBM POWER™ architecture, it serves as the processing brains behind Sony's Playstation 3 gaming console.

Versatility the key
In addition to its performance benchmarks, the Cell processor also stands out for the way it was designed. While gaming was the catalyst to the Cell's development, its architects–from IBM Research and IBM Systems Technology Group–followed a strategy designed to maximise the processor's versatility in other areas. To achieve this, they analysed and designed in the workload requirements of key building block areas, such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics and scientific workloads. Equally critical is the chip's vector processing architecture, which–like the scientific supercomputers it emulates–is capable of performing several operations simultaneously. It's this ability to pack tremendous power into a small form factor that makes the Cell processor a "game-changing" technology, one with the potential of opening up a whole new set of uses–until now thought impossible. It was in realising this potential, however, that IBM faced no small challenge.

"One of Mercury's strengths is that it really understands the details of these vertical markets and the horizontal technology attributes that cut across markets. Combine this with Mercury's expertise in parallel processing programming, and it's the perfect mix to unleash the Cell's performance potential."

–Raj S. Desai, Vice President, IBM Engineering and Technology Services

The same factor that enables the Cell's breakthrough performance in gaming realism-its large-scale parallel processing capabilities-also makes it more complex to adapt to the other image processing applications for which it is well suited. One key example is medical imaging, where IBM's Cell technology has the potential to significantly improve the image quality of CT scans, MRIs and mammograms, thus enabling earlier detection and more successful treatment. Another is the ability to put supercomputer-class terrain simulation in a tank or on the dash of a Humvee. While the Cell's multi-processor architecture makes it a tight fit to these applications, the key to success is in optimising how the chip allocates workloads to each of its eight processing engines, like an eight-person team in which no worker is idle and productivity is maximised. IBM realised that ultimately, the development of smart, highly specialised applications was the key to unleashing the Cell's full performance potential. Intent on leveraging one of the centerpieces of its intellectual property (IP) and an important strategic asset, the company looked to IBM Technology Collaboration Services (ITCS) to provide direction.

Making it happen with collaborative innovation
ITCS assessed the situation and saw a clear opportunity for collaborative innovation with a strategic partner. While IBM had the IP foundation and world-class chip manufacturing capabilities, it needed a partner with a strong knowledge of customer needs and a solid track record in specialised high-end imaging applications. Mercury Computer Systems, with a 20-year history of building advanced parallel processing solutions for the defense, medical imaging and other key industries, was the ideal fit for this role. ITCS proposed an alliance that would meld IBM's horizontal capabilities in chip development and manufacturing with Mercury's vertical market expertise in embedded applications.

More than a pooling of resources, the alliance provided the framework for truly collaborative innovation that played to the complementary strengths of Mercury and IBM for the benefit of their mutual customers. Under the alliance, IBM would provide the technology, while Mercury would translate its customers' niche market preferences into board-level specifications and develop applications to optimise overall processor performance. ITCS, as a facilitator of this collaboration, would work closely with Mercury's technical staff to bridge the gap from design to manufacture. The latter would be performed by IBM using its advanced manufacturing methods, including silicon-on-insulator processes and low capacitance dielectrics. This flexible arrangement enabled both IBM and Mercury to serve their mutual customers better than either could have done alone–the definition of synergy.

Hardware:	BladeCenter
Services:	Engineering and Technology Services (E&TS)