CSPI RTS-860: Industry’s First Integrated Embedded Multiprocessing Environment

The CSPI RTS-860 was the embedded industry’s first  real time multiprocessing environment. CSPI, http://www.cspi.com/support/itsd26es.htm, a Billerica, Ma.based DSP manufacturer launched the product concept in the mid 1990’s. At that time the DSP market was in a transition having moved from box array processors that were attached to minicomputers to plug in Intel i860 boards. Various DSP comings sported these designs but CSPI reached the market first with the SuperCard. The CSPI SuperCard came in configurations contained either one, two, three or four i860’s.  We were having great success selling individual SuperCards but even with adding of software the ASP was in the low to mid teens. We needed a way to get a certain percentage of sales to at least equal or exceed the amount we were getting for the last phases of the box DSP sales. It was decided we would attempt to reach a different class of customer and target the systems market as a companion to our board business. Thus the concept of the RTS-860 was developed using a combination of modular software packages from Multiprocessor Toolsmiths Inc,   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_Operating_System and Software Components Group Inc to accomplish the programming and interactive debugging. The RTS-860 offered supercomputer-range performance by combining multiple SuperCard VME boards. These cards contained multiple Intel i860 processors and were housed in a chassis managed by a Motorola MVME167 host. This system runs an environment that consists of SCGI's pSOS+ real-time kernel and Toolsmith’s Unison operating system. The pSOS+ component provided the underlying multitasking and multiprocessing services and capabilities while Unison contributed UNIX-compatible file and network access system calls as well as remote procedure calls. This system was ahead of it’s time in that it allowed for other boards besides the CPU and SuperCards to be integrated into the system for tasks specific to the application. This heterogeneous environment was aided by software tools from Toolsmith’s that automated the development of applications. We sold systems to many of the major DOD primes for all types of applications in sonar, radar, data acquistion, sensor fusion and image processing. . A typical system sale was in the 120K-140K range. The largest sale was to a sonar application being done by the University of Texas Austin’s Navy Applied Research Lab. The lab purchased multiple RTS-860 with a complete Toolsmiths package and then integrated other boards for data acquisition and display. It would be interesting to see where the applications developed in this environment migrated to and under what type of paradigm they are operating in today.