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DARPA Awards HPC Contracts To IBM, Cray, Not Sun
snedecor writes "DARPA has awarded a third round of funding for the next-generation petascale computing system. IBM and Cray roughly split the $494M, while Sun, with little track record, received none. This is in spite of Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication."
Now, of the two stated applications, which do you think is more interesting to the military? I suppose one could argue defense against bioterror, but it's still kinda scary.
Google's HPC "innovations" are surely software-based, are they not? Not sure they've done anything in the hardware arena that warrants press releases.
The HPCA program is a "cover" (not so cover) funding to companies. The problem is that it is not so clear that it is even good for them. The reason is that "lots" of additional resources from these companies are also diverted for these projects. Since these machines have a "doubtful" application besides the DARPA contract, I think that it may be better for these companies to invest on research more related to their product or may-be products.
For example, Sun Labs was in charge of the DARPA project at Sun. They have "invested" 3 years on that. My question is "what do they have to show?".
They do not have publications on any top computer architecture conference, they do not seem to have anything that may save Sun ass. (At least from
an architecture point of view)
This is not such a strange comment, I have head it from people at IBM research itself. Some people there is not sure that winning is the best thing either.
Google are experts at scaling out, not up. Running applications to serve 10000 users at the same time is different from executing one massive program. The main way in which Google and HPC (High Performance Computing, i.e. Supercomputers) overlap is in enormous file systems.
This kind of processor is not suited for the high-performance scientific applications, like simulating a nuclear explosion, that DARPA typically runs.
By contrast, IBM is one of the 3 remaining American companies that still makes general-purpose, complex, and powerful cores for crunching scientific applications. The other two companies are AMD and Intel.
Not surprisingly, IBM is always highly competitive in bidding to be the supplier of computing machines to the military. Right now, an IBM system is coordinating the broad-based anti-missile system defending North America.
Sun does have a competitive complex processor: the SPARC64, designed and built by Japanese engineers. However, DARPA was likely seeking only bids using American technology. SPARC64 would not have met the domestic-content qualifications.
Someone else will probably license Sun's proximity communication technology at some point, but it might be the graphics card makers. The proximity communication stuff lets you hook together multiple chips, almost as if they were part of the same die, using a bunch of capacitor-like plates in the chips. This could be very useful for putting some amount of memory (almost) on the cpu die, and putting a very wide bus between that memory and the processor. Both IBM and Cray currently use very expensive ceramic multichip modules to connect multiple dies together, and they are still somewhat limited in the number of connections that can be attached through the modules.
Apart from that, I don't really know what advances they had. Solaris can scale to 100 processors fairly well, but both IBM and Cray have been working on scalable operating systems for systems with tens of thousands of CPUs. The rock processor would likely be a lot faster than sun's current processors, but it's an incremental advance for microprocessors. Both IBM and Cray are working on more radical technology with FPGAs, vector CPUs, highly treaded designs, and sophisticated coprocessors, and very scalable interconnects.
So, IBM and Cray took the prize... Sun lost. And where is the other major US HPC vendor HP? Did they even enter the competition? Do they have anything new to say?
Niagra 1's FP indeed sucks, but I thought they were fixing that for Niagra 2. I heard about an FPU-per-core design being done (maybe that's a later follow-on?).
This was modded funny, but it's an interesting point. I've been able to tour a couple big HPC type facilities and I've spoken to some academic types who were involved in other projects. From what I can tell, the HPC community is all over Linux. Linux is pretty much the de facto platform of choice, for all sorts of reasons. I understand that a lot of people in the life sciences were enamored of Apple's later-model PowerPC hardware for HPC applications, but even they would tend to reformat and install Yellow Dog. Wouldn't it be a shame if Sun got overlooked for this contract because it insisted on pushing Solaris?
... because OpenSolaris is nearly as free (in every sense) these days as Linux, and it has some great technology in it, including a battle-hardened networking stack.
... too bad it came to naught.
And then again, might it not be a shame again
A poster above questioned whether the companies that get awarded these DARPA contracts really see any benefit from it. But a major government HPC contract running on Solaris could potentially be a big marketing boost for Sun
Breakfast served all day!
Fortress, the language being developed by a bunch of people led by Guy Steele, was funded as part of the HPCS effort. This means that DARPA is going with IBM or Cray's language (X10 for IBM, Chapel from Cray). According to a press release quoted at http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2063043,00.as p (but not available at http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/index.xml) the work will continue, but how likely is it to succeed?
l Slides9Jun2006.pdf - I thought it was pretty impressive.
Guy Steele gave an excellent talk at OOPSLA on Fortress - the slides are at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/PLDITutoria
The groups's site is at http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/
http://www.acooke.org