Shipping news - export clearance for RTUs required

IBM 604 Calculator from 1948 - a very very low APP.

Invensys industrial automation teams have been engineering large scale automation of production fields and pipelines for many years.  Recently much investment has been turned toward renewing and improving existing sites rather than applying for big capital to create greenfield projects.  Many older sites need a lot of new gear to get the most efficient production from them in times where sometime cash is not so freely available. Of course all the new gear is based on more modern chip technology with higher MIP ratings and .. yes... you guessed it.. even controllers and Remote Terminal Units have to be cross-checked for their Ajusted Peak Performance [APP] ratings before getting export permission to ship to some destinations.


Foxboro's SCD2200 RTU is used in upstream production and pipeline solutions for oil and gas transport.  The RTUs are used on block valves, pump stations and compressor stations to effectively monitor and provide a supervisory control interface for remote operations.  We recently started a project in IRAQ which has high performance computer [HPC] export controls in place. 

According to U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, calculation of Adjusted Peak Performance (APP) is used to determine whether or not a computer system should be restricted for export under High Performance Computer (HPC) export controls.

The measure for determination is the Adjusted Peak Performance rating of the CPU used in the RTU.

The (simplified) algorithm used to calculate APP consists of the following steps:

• Determine how many 64 bit (or better) floating point operations every processor in the system can perform per clock cycle (best case). This is FPO(i).
• Determine the clock frequency of every processor. This is F(i).
• Choose the weighting factor for each processor: 0.9 for vector processors and 0.3 for non-vector processors. This is W(i).
• Calculate the APP for the system as follows: APP = FPO(1) * F(1) * W(1) + ... + FPO(n) * F(n) * W(n).

Now the answer is in Weighted Teraflops [WT] just to get the scaling factor right.

The RTU's CPU is generally speaking is NOT a high performance computation unit and does not perform floating point operations natively, however - for those interested... here is the APP calculation for our SCD2200 CPU.

In any event, and in case someone wishes to understand the APP based on software libraries ability to perform 64bit calculations we have calculated APP for the CP-30 based on the based on US departments practitioners guide as follows:

The CP-30 uses a single Cirrus Logic EP9301 processor which has an ARM920T core, benchmarked at 200 MIPS @ 180 MHz. In the SCD2200 the CP-30 processor module the processor is running at 183.3 MIPS.

APP = W * R * 10E-12

Where

W = 0.3 (non-vectored processor)

R = number of 64 bit floating point operations per second

Given that CPU can perform ~183,300,000 instructions per second and each 64 bit calculation takes around 100 instructions then

R = 183,300,000 / 100 = 1,833,000 = 183E4

Thus

APP = 0.3 * 183E4 * 10E-12

APP = 0.00000055 (WT) - The APP of the SCD2200 CPU.

Computers with an APP > 0.75 WT are considered high peformance for the purpose of export control.

So there you have it with such an extremely low APP number we should no issue with this solution and equipment - but the final determination is always with the various departments associated with export controls. 

For further reference and reading on the background to this I recommend the associated reference wiki page...ref : wikipedia.org wiki Adjusted_Peak_Performance



Photo : CC : Attribution Share-Alike : Ryan Somma : Flikr IBM 604 Calculator