DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer

coondoggie writes "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 desires for Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) will require a new system-wide technology approach including hardware and software co-design to minimize energy dissipation per operation and maximize energy efficiency, with a 50GFLOPS per watt goal."

Comments

Re:Yeah sure

[rtyhurst]

19 inch box?

The IBM Roadrunner:

"occupies approximately 6,000 square feet..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner

Good luck with that...

Could at least editors have a look at TFA?

[Gruturo]

It's a 19" _rack_, not _box_. As in, the standard (non-telco) datacenter rack size, accomodating up to 42U, 19" wide.

Re:Simpler solution.

[tomhudson]

Redefine a Gigaflop. Say 1 billion floating point instructions per century.

Gigaflop doesn't even have a time dimension.

Are you on drugs? Sure it does: FLoating point Operations Per Second.

Hint - they're looking for a machine that can do 50 gigaFLOPs. Such performance is always measured per unit of time. Same as 1 horsepower is 550 foot-pounds per second.

If you google for it yourself, you can keep your beginners-level trainee deck swab geek card :-)

Re:Simpler solution.

[blueg3]

That's right -- gigaflops has a time dimension.

Gigaflop, on the other hand, doesn't. One gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations. One gigaflops is a billion floating-point operations per second. Contrary to "obvious" rules of grammar, the "s" isn't pluaralization, it's the unit "seconds".

It's doable, but too expensive

[bertok]

This is actually probably quite doable, but would be filthy expensive.

Most people don't realize, but digital electronics is way, WAY ahead of what you get in your home PC, if you're willing to pony up the cash.

For example, non-Silicon based semiconductors often outperform the good old standard stuff significantly. Silicon is by no means the fastest, it's just the cheapest. Gallium Arsenide and Indium-based materials can both clock many gigahertz higher than Silicion for the same process size and power dissipation. They're toxic, fragile, and the largest wafer sizes are tiny, so not exactly mainstream, but available now.

The real performance king though is the Rapid Single Flux Quantum process, which can go over 100 GHz easily. It's used in things like radio telescope amplifiers and high-performance DSPs for military radar. Sure, it requires liquid helium cooling, but it also only requires milliwatts per gigaflop, so it's just about the only technology that'll let you squeeze a petaflop into a box and not have it melt into slag. That still means you'd need something like a kilowatt of cryogenic cooling, which is nontrivial, but still, I'd say it's doable with a bit of engineering wizardry.