December 17, 2020
COM-HPC® Taking Standardized COMs to the next level
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Enabling more powerful and sophisticated embedded servers and client devices for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications is a constant challenge for the embedded computing industry. In 2017 this led the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG®) to introduce its COM Express® Type 7 standard. Kontron was fast to market with its first COMe Type 7 multicore processor embedded solutions, supporting powerful data analysis and real-time processing for edge server platforms.
However, the embedded computing industry must always be ready to anticipate and respond quickly to the challenges of future technologies and applications. These are being driven by the industrial internet of things (IIoT), some of which are already starting to make an impact: artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and 5G wireless will create enormous data volumes and require unprecedented computing power and greater connectivity. At the same time, totally new design concepts for embedded computers are urgently required as existing standards will no longer be sufficient to cope.
In response to these growing high-performance computing requirements, a new working group was set up last year as part of the PICMG® standardization committee. This is to ensure the COM standard remains fit-for-purpose in the future. As a member of PICMG®, Kontron has been a driving influencer of the COM Express® standard since its inception. The company continues to be deeply involved in new developments, ensuring the standard’s continued
success and evolution. Therefore, Kontron is currently collaborating on a new highly specific High Performance Computing standard which will be complementary to COM Express® while taking the proven concept of standardized COMs to a whole new level.
This whitepaper considers the work that Kontron and other leading manufacturers are undertaking in order to deliver the new complementary COM Express® standard later this year: Computer-On-Modules High Performance Computing (COM-HPC®). In addition to reviewing the background to this initiative and highlighting the forthcoming standard’s key features, the future implications for COM Express® are also discussed.
