Monday, June 29, 2009

DARPA Acknowledges COTS Dead for HPC

If you can squish all the processing power of say an IBM Roadrunner supercomputer inside a 19-inch box and make it run on about 60 kilowatts of electricity, the government wants to talk to you.

The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week issued a call for research that might develop a super-small, super-efficient super beast of a computer.

Specifically DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) desires will require:

-New system-wide technology approaches specifically including hardware and software co-design to minimize energy dissipation per operation and maximize energy efficiency, with a 50GFLOPS per watt goal, without sacrificing scalability to ultra-high performance DoD applications - efficiency.

-New technologies and execution models that do not require application programmers to explicitly manage system complexity, in terms of architectural attributes with respect to data locality and concurrency, to achieve their performance and time to solution goals - programmability.

-Technology that will manage hardware and software concurrency, minimizing overhead for thousand- to billion-way parallelism for the system-level programmer.

-A system-wide approach to achieve reliability and security through fault management techniques enabling an application to execute correctly through both failures and attacks.

Current processing systems are grossly power-inefficient and typically deliver only a small fraction of peak performance. Until recently, advances in Commercial Off-The-Shelf systems performances were enabled by increases in clock speed, decreases in supply voltage, and growth in transistor count. These technology trends have reached a performance wall where increasing clock speed results in unacceptably large power increases, and decreasing voltage causes increasing susceptibility to transient and permanent errors, DARPA stated.


Finally. Rant later.

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