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

Going against Resistance is futile. Sidestep it.

[jack2000]

Supercool that fucker! That might help a lot!

Re:No problem

[oneirophrenos]

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.

The company who were closest have gone broke

[Jacques Chester]

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.