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PIM/Paracell Product Summary |
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The PIM is ideal for deployed and embedded applications. From inception to fruition, the PIM and Paracell were designed to meet high reliability. Measures were taken in all aspects of the design to ensure maximum uptime.
Assigning reliability as a major architectural design priority enabled the PIM design team to attack the cause of reliability problems instead of their side effects. The PIM uses standard offtheshelf components to ensure a higher degree of reliability. Typically, a PIM installation is powered by on-line, uninterruptable power.
The PIM can do the job of many machines. Potentially hundreds of programmable devices can be replaced with a PIM. Relying on one machine makes far more sense than relying on a hundred machines. Each individual machine in a multi-platform architecture is a potential point of failure, as is each connection between platforms. Furthermore, maintaining a database is far easier and more reliable in one machine; one machine is more practical to monitor and maintain, and can also be repaired much faster with less net downtime for the entire system.
Depending upon the configuration, many hardware changes may be made without cold-booting the PIM. Most software changes may be made without halting production.
Testing software to ensure that all possible situations are properly handled is extremely difficult. Many software bugs occur in production when a unique sequence of events occur that were not accounted for by the programmer. Because the architecture specifies that program tiles receive fixed and guaranteed resources, there are far fewer unknowns and thus, a far lower chance that untested cases will occur in production.
Paracell is a language designed to take advantage of parallel architecture. Using Paracell and the Navigator environment, code becomes more modular. The concept of cells communicating only through global memory significantly reduces the amount of "administrative" code required with most software languages. Tools such as the tracker, the editor, and the compiler play key roles in increasing software productivity, and in ensuring the integrity and robustness of developed code.
Should a software modification be required in production, tile code may be downloaded to the PIM without halting operations. The development workstations always download code at frame boundaries, and are targeted to specific cells such that only those cells being modified are affected.
Failures would typically originate from the factory or process being controlled by the PIM, or from within the PIM. The PIM and Paracell provide for quick diagnosis of either kind of failure ensuring a rapid recovery.
In conventional systems diagnostics are usually added last if they are added at all, and are often never completed for fear of affecting the response time of the system. Due to the PIM's systolic and expandable architecture, power is always available to satisfy the installation of comprehensive diagnostics without ever affecting response time. The user pays no penalty for the early incorporation of diagnostics, because more cells may be added if it becomes evident that they are needed.
In order to diagnose external failures, such as the failure of a limit switch on a drilling station, tiles must be written that check for invalid conditions, or that analyze logic chains. PIM/Paracell systems come equipped with powerful software tools, like SoftScope and Debugger, that can perform diagnostics of their own in addition to maximizing the use of user-installed diagnostics.
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