By Jason Wade | December 21, 2020

Thinking Outside the Rack

Whenever we ask customers about what they need in a mission computer, they always tell us to reduce size, weight and power. Over the years, we’ve responded by finding new lightweight materials and figuring out new ways to optimize our designs.

Ultimately, though, we reached a point where we couldn’t reduce much further because we were constrained by the rackmount form factor. So, this time we asked customers, what’s more important: reducing SWaP or the ability to rackmount?

The resounding answer was that SWaP is far more important. Figuring out how to bolt down military computers is the easy part for them.

Traditional designs

The 19-inch rack form factor dates back to the 1920s when AT&T established it as a standard. Since then, it has been widely adopted across telecommunication, computing, audio, video, entertainment and other industries. It’s interesting to realize that so much of the rugged computer industry still revolves around this legacy approach. In fact, relatively few manufacturers have the capability to develop the custom shapes and sizes customers need today.

Like other manufacturers, we designed our military computers to fit in a rack. We used ATX / Extended ATX motherboards because they offered the capabilities most customers wanted. But, with the latest COM Express Type 7 spec, new possibilities have emerged and we can now replace the cumbersome motherboard with a much smaller, more versatile baseboard. COMx Express provides the flexibility to tailor the daughterboard to unique factors that traditional form-factors don’t support and still maintain the relevant I/O capabilities.

Compute requirements for mission computers have evolved such that they are now on a par with enterprise computing. A mission computer might typically include a 16-Core Intel Xeon D processor. Dual processor sockets are no longer required because much of the workload has shifted to the GPU, due to the growing emphasis on graphical content.

The powerhouse at the heart of today’s high-performance mission computers is a GPU using the latest NVIDIA technologies. The GPU is the single most expensive component and, as it turns out, it is the form factor of the NVIDIA card that ultimately determines how small we can make a mission computer.

With a fresh canvas, we set out to give customers exactly what they asked for. Along the way, we discovered some unexpected things.

Lessons learned

First, we were able to take all the enterprise compute capability of our 30- pound rackmount system and fit it into a new design that is the size of a shoebox and weighs only 9 pounds. The new box requires less power and its shape allows better airflow. Instead of a bunch of little fans—which tend to be noisy—we can use just two larger fans, so the unit runs much quieter and is cool to the touch.

The design is also quite scalable because COMe type 7 provides up to 32 PCIe lanes that can be allocated as needed. For example, in our ZM3 mission computer, we use 8 lanes for storage and the remaining 24 for expansion cards, typically up to 16 graphics cards and 8 encoders.

COM Express Type 7 supports the NVMe PCIe for super fast and ultra-compact storage. Using NVMe SSD drives increases read/write speeds three to four times compared to SATA 3. The new spec also provides 10GbE LAN for rapid communication of video over the network.

We recently had a chance to demonstrate our new ZM3 mission computer. When we took the cover off the unit to let people look inside, the feedback from military customers was exciting and, at the same time, a little humbling.

What they said was, “Thank you for hearing us and finally giving us what we need.” Have we been overestimating the importance of rackmount systems and missing out on the opportunity to give customers the shapes and sizes they actually need?