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DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer

Posted by timothy on from the as-do-we-all dept.

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."

10 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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.

    And just as soon as they go back to loving and protecting freedom, then and only then will the government deserve my help with anything.

    1. Re:Yeah sure by russotto · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And just as soon as they go back to loving and protecting freedom, then and only then will the government deserve my help with anything.

      Yeah, my first thought on this was whether perhaps those were the requirements to get the things inside every AT&T-style NSA listening room.

    2. Re:Yeah sure by catdriver · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Exactly.

      It's totally unscientific, but I just ran Xbench on my 2009 Mac mini and got around 3 GigaFLOPS. It's not very accurate, but probably good to within an order of magnitude.

      According to Wikipedia's supercomputer article, that compares roughly with a 1985 Cray-2, which cost about $25 million at the time and was the size of a large closet.

      All we have to do is wait about 25 years.

    3. Re:Yeah sure by EbeneezerSquid · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Contrary to your apparent view, the vast majority of the individuals in the US Government do love freedom and wish to protect it.
      The defense department tends to be the place that these people are most concentrated: the same Defense Department that DARPA serves.

      I doubt that ANYONE in the government does not Love and wish to protect Freedom:
      There are those, however, who may undermine it unintentionally due to a lack of understanding of what their "payment to supports," will actually cause in the long run.
      This is called "Being naive".
      With luck, it can be corrected.
      With time, any damage can be reversed, as long as those who understand what has happened and do truly Love Freedom persevere.

      Complaining and Blaming others accomplishes little.

  2. Going against Resistance is futile. Sidestep it. by jack2000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Supercool that fucker! That might help a lot!

  3. Re:No problem by oneirophrenos · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just stick a human brain in a bucket. It's small, quiet, cool and just feed it a Cheeto every once in a while to keep it running.

    And since the human brain has a computational power of 100 petaflops at 20 watts, it'd well exceed DARPA's requirements.

  4. Re:NVIDIA by stevelinton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I imagine they will build something along those lines. Lots of highly specialised cores that can do Floating Point really well if it carefully compiled for them; some switches for some fast short-range network protocol probably and a few general purpose cores to manage things. Maybe some field-programmable components so that you can customise the hardware for new applications. The current nVidia Tesla series achieves around 1GFLOP per Watt, and you can get 1 TFLOP, consuming 1 KW per U, (ignoring host processors and many other things), so they're looking at roughly a 50 fold improvement by designing for HPC from the ground up, rather than graphics first and HPC as a side-show. That, plus a couple of generations of Moore's law doesn't sound too improbable.

  5. The company who were closest have gone broke by Jacques+Chester · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A firm called SiCortex was selling just this sort of compact, energy-efficient supercomputer. They shut down a few weeks ago because an investor pulled out.

    It's a damn shame, they had really cool stuff. If I was Johnathon Schwartz I wouldn't have pissed away $1 billion on MySQL (it was worth maybe $10 and a stick of gum), I would have been out the front of SiCortex banging on the door with a chequebook.

    Oh well.

    --

    Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.

  6. Re:Simpler solution. by EbeneezerSquid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, as it is a different abbreviation.
    FLoating point Operations Per Second
    FLoating point OPerations
    Neither are really good acronyms, (That would be FPOPS and FPO), but they are the accepted terms.

    HOWEVER: It is all nitpicky geek-out, I'm-better-than-you, You're-So-Dumb-You-forgot-the-"S". B.S.
    Please.
    This is Slashdot, not middle school.
    hard to tell some times, I know.

  7. Re:NVIDIA by EbeneezerSquid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not necessarily easy to program.
    It just cannot require explicit knowledge of the system architecture in order to program, like the old mainframes did.
    Of course, there is something to be said for explicitly managed systems. A mainframe with 512kbytes of memory ran the air defense of the United States from the 1970s until 2004 (well, three of them). Why wasn't it replaced earlier? Because they tried to, four times, with general purpose computers but, until 2004 (and a dozen-or-so Opterons), they couldn't handle the load.

    But the military no longer trains many programmers. And hiring Contractors (or G.S.'s) to program for explicitly managed systems is very, very expensive.