NEWS BRIEFS
Chelmsford, MASS. — Mercury Computer Systems, Inc., a leading provider of real-time digital signal and image processing systems, announced today the RACE++ Series MULTI Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The integration of the MULTI development tools will accelerate application development for Mercury’s RACE++ Series multicomputer systems based on PowerPC microprocessors.
“With the RACE++ Series MULTI IDE our customers will be able to reduce time to market through the use of familiar, mainstream development and debugging tools,” said Richard Jaenicke, director of product marketing at Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. “Many of our customers are already familiar with MULTI and its highly productive toolset, so the learning curve is often nonexistent.”
Mercury collaborated with Green Hills Software, Inc., of Santa Barbara, Calif., to adapt the popular MULTI 2000 IDE to the Mercury platform. “MULTI’s integrated debug, program build, profiling and version control facilities streamline development of complex real-time software for Mercury systems based on the RACE++ architecture and PowerPC microprocessors,” said John Carbone, vice president of marketing at Green Hills Software. “MULTI makes it easy for application developers to access the PowerPC’s superscalar and vector processing facilities without having to program in assembly language, and the Green Hills optimizing compilers take full advantage of the PowerPC by implementing the AltiVec extensions to the C language.”
Mercury customer Northrop Grumman Norden Systems, of Melville, N.Y., is looking forward to shorter deployment cycles with the RACE++ Series MULTI IDE. “Six years ago we decided to align our hardware and software development with the multiprocessor products from Mercury Computer Systems,” said Chris Cenzoprano, design development engineer with Northrop Grumman Norden Systems’ Electronic Sensors and Systems Division. “The move to Mercury’s cutting-edge performance platforms has been a great benefit. We are delighted with Mercury’s decision to include the Green Hills MULTI tools. These tools should help us provide quicker deployment of systems.”
The RACE++ Series MULTI IDE helps customers accelerate software development for Mercury’s PowerPC-based RACE++ products. The initial release features a context-sensitive text editor, a source-level debugger, a graphical program builder, and a version control system. The full release of MULTI IDE will add a run-time error checker, a performance profiler, graphical browsers and optimizing compilers.
Mercury provides high-performance PCI and VMEbus multiprocessing systems for digital signal and image processing applications based on the RACEway Interlink standard. The RACE++ architecture, also developed by Mercury, is a second-generation switched fabric that extends the aggregate bandwidth of RACE crossbar switches from 480 Mbytes/sec to 1 Gbyte/sec. RACE++ systems are powered by PowerPC microprocessors, in configurations that scale from handfuls to hundreds of processors and gigaflops.
The RACE++ Series MULTI IDE is available for Windows NT and Solaris hosts and will be available to Mercury customers in a phased offering during the next five months, with an early release available in February 2001, and a complete version available in the spring. Additional information is available on Mercury’s website at http:www.mc.com/software/multi_ide.html .
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