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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."
17" tower? 3.8 GHz?
I'm sure the thinkers of 1941 would be shocked to know what we can do now, given they were running 10 Hz on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
hmmm... fits in one rack and has enough processing to do word recognition on all of the calls coming in to one telephone central office simultaneously. I wonder what they want a whole bunch of these for?
This combination of power required and volume would allow essentially for current day supercomputer in every single military vehicle, assuming the weight and heat exhaust constraints aren't too onerous. 60 kW is about 80 horsepower and even a 19 in x 19 in x 19 in cube is only about 4 cubic feet*, which is less than than the trunk space on a Mazda Miata (5.1 cubic ft for a 2006 model), so it's within the space-power envelope of a small sports car, albeit the engine would need to be uprated some to account for the power drain.
Having such great computational power available to every single vehicle would open up a huge realm of possibilities: Combine it with sensors you could detect damage and minimize its effects by comparing the vehicle's response to a detailed finite element model. You could do on the fly aerodynamic analysis, allowing a fighter to keep performing to it's best even after damage has significantly altered it's shape. You could manage the control of thousands of actuators, allowing you to create a shapeshifting walker out of programmable matter, and you could definitely do learning/optimization algorithms that would allow for an AI capable of a significant amount of learning. Combine this with the amount of image processing it could do, and you're very near a completely autonomous, smart enough combat vehicle.
While it's a too big for a man portable system, with work, you could fit such a device (and a power source) into something as small as a motorcycle or a somewhat scaled up iRobot Warrior. That's not much more than man sized. It may not be a T-800, that much computation in that small size and power envelope is enough build a near-man sized autonomous fighting vehicle that can see, learn and adapt with an endurance on gas of several hours. It's a bit frightening to consider.
--sabre86
Redefine a Gigaflop. Say 1 billion floating point instructions per century.
Hey - It worked for hard disk manufacturers for gigabytes.
It works all the time for food companies when they say something now has "only" X number of calories per portion, by making the portions something like "2 potato chips."
It works for ISPs for "unlimited Internet access".
It works for Microsoft for "most secure [insert whatever] ever."
It worked for George "Mission Accomplished" Bush. Kinda ...
It'll work for Barack "No tax increase for anyone making under $250,000" Obama. (okay, I'll give you that it's really doubtful for that one)
Now where's my grant money?
The downwash from the rotors on the black helicopter its mounted on should help.
Exactly. There are always incredulous responses to this kind of challenge. Everything is impossible. Until it's not anymore. That's research, that's progress. There's no better way to get people to innovate on crazy shit then to tell them it's almost impossible.
That can't be true, unless you're taking the extreme long view. Let's say that you raise a 1 ton block 10 feet using a block and tackle and your own muscles. You'll certainly generate heat, but, when you're done, you'll have something like 30,000 joules stored as potential energy. Until it's released, it's not going to turn to heat.
It's interesting how the "estimated computational power of the brain" seems to increase every few years to keep it very far ahead of the fastest supercomputer of the time.
If they thought it would happen this year, DARPA wouldn't be interested.
Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency
These are the guys who fund the crazy stuff, like robotic exoskeletons (Starship Troopers), Electronic Telepathy (via radio/net), and more.
NOTHING they fund is expected to bear fruit quickly, but when it does bear fruit, that fruit is like gold (case in point, a little thing once called ARPANET.