Mercury Computer Systems Teams with IBM to Build Cell Processor-Based Systems

The alliance offers Mercury access to IBM's vast trove of technology capabilities through IBM's Engineering and Technology Services group. Mercury has initial plans to integrate the Cell microprocessor technology into a wide variety of future products, with the aim of dramatically boosting computing performance in Mercury's customer applications. By incorporating Cell technology, Mercury intends to take demanding applications such as radar, sonar, MRI, CT, digital X-ray, and others to a new level of sophistication and performance.

Mercury and engineers from IBM's Engineering and Technology Services unit will collaborate to develop products with dramatically improved performance for graphic-intensive workloads and computationally intensive applications. The optimized Cell-based products will be targeted at current and new applications in medical imaging, industrial inspection, aerospace and defense, seismic processing, and telecommunications. New sensor capabilities in these markets are dramatically increasing the volumes of available data to be processed. For example, applying the processing power of Cell technology in medical imaging can yield significant improvements in image quality - enabling earlier detection of diseases and potentially saving lives.

"The tremendous performance advantages afforded by the Cell processor will enable Mercury to address an even broader range of compute-intensive challenges for our customers," said Jay Bertelli, president and chief executive officer, Mercury Computer Systems, Inc. "Our relationship with IBM, a leader in advanced technologies, upholds Mercury's commitment to open innovation, in leveraging expertise within and outside of Mercury."

The Cell processor, developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony Group, is a breakthrough architectural design featuring eight synergistic processing elements plus a Power Architecture™-based core that provides unmatched performance levels in many computationally intense applications. The Cell processor has peak performance in excess of 200 GFLOPS - which equates to 200 billion floating-point operations per second - as measured during initial hardware testing.

The IBM and Mercury initiative leverages the capabilities of IBM's Engineering and Technology Services organization, providing Mercury unique access to the Cell processor technology to augment Mercury's renowned engineering expertise. As a leading supplier of highly engineered and integrated computing solutions, Mercury remains focused on meeting the demands of its OEM customers with an evolving, comprehensive choice of products and services.

"We are pleased to partner with Mercury to develop leading-edge computing systems based on the revolutionary Cell architecture," said Raj S. Desai, vice president, IBM Engineering and Technology Services. "IBM and its world-class engineering team is dedicated to collaborating with innovative companies like Mercury to deliver the next generation of computing systems to benefit businesses around the globe."