The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has officially commenced a multi-year research effort to develop a superconducting computer as a long-term solution to the power, cooling and space constraints that afflict modern high-performance computing. First revealed in February 2013, when the agency put out a call for proposals, the Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program aims to pave the way for a new generation of superconducting supercomputers that are far more energy efficient than machines based on complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
Studies indicate the technology, which uses low temperatures in the 4-10 kelvin range to enable information to be transmitted with minimal energy loss, could yield one-petaflop systems that use just 25 kW and 100 petaflop systems that operate at 200 kW, including the cryogenic cooler. Compare this to the current greenest system, the L-CSC supercomputer from the GSI Helmholtz Center, which achieved 5.27 gigaflops-per-watt on the most-recent Green500 list. If scaled linearly to an exaflop supercomputing system, it would consume about 190 megawatts (MW), still quite a bit short of DARPA targets, which range from 20MW to 67MW.
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