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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."
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.
...They're EXTREME scientists!
You must be joking. That's like packing in 30 2KW electric fan heaters into a rack, obstructing the airflow with a ton of other junk and praying it won't melt. Good luck with that.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
It's a 19" _rack_, not _box_. As in, the standard (non-telco) datacenter rack size, accomodating up to 42U, 19" wide.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
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.
Supercool that fucker! That might help a lot!
Is that all they're allowing? Power nazis.
-R
Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!
If could be put at near 0 K (and the power to maintain that temperature is not counted) maybe a superconducing supercomputer could get that speed in that size.
Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!
That sounds like a nice bumper sticker. For the rear bumper.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Two! Two! Two projects in one!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Perhaps with bio-computing or near-atom-scale computing, with the equivalent of transistors being not much bigger than a baker's dozen standard-sized buckyballs.
But with conventional technology? I think Moore's law will break down before we reach this goal.
The brain-in-a-bucket comment earlier is probably more insightful than funny in this context.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!
Oh, yeah? Where's your badge?
Do you think id admit it and have the Feds take it from me for nothing and classify it? No thanks.
And for the record, it wouldn't be that hard to do, as long as you wanted a semi-dedicated supercomputer and not a general purpose box.. But no, i wont tell you how, even if i was authorized.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Pack thermionic converters between the components. They'll help cool and recover some power from heat back to power. They can be on the board, or placed on a cover over it in such a way as to fit between the board components. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/electricity-1205.html
Build in parallel processing with 16 processors, 4 on each side of a 4D-cube, as in the Connection Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine
Three boards, stacked. Top, thermionics on the underside fitting between the main components, top side of the board is keyboard. Main in the middle, components top side. Bottom board, cram full of memory, below main board to keep it away from the heat. Vents underneath and through memory and main boards, so convection can feed heat to the top board.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Grendel wouldn't stand a chance!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
I think they should include DARPA in the acronym, so you get to spend all this money on a DUH PC.
Maybe it could even run WinDUHs!
It would be an induhspensible part of our computing future, duhtermining the ability of our government's uhbility to duhrive new induhstries!
Yes, please tag this story "wheresmypony".
After all, I am strangely colored.
What about the NVIDIA Cuda architecture? They claim it is a super computer for under 10 grand and doesn't require special power requirements. But, I wonder if it will only perform as a super computer for graphics ....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... run Linux?
Aeroespacio.org
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
Just stay around girls called Sarah Connor. A supercomputer of around that size will appear eventually, and you will take as bonus a portable nuclear reactor, and a somewhat aggressive AI. Be sure to erase memory because it surely will contain a nasty trojan horse.
I can't imagine pushing 60 kilowatts through a 19" rack mount ANYTHING without EVERYTHING catching on fire.
Seriously, that's a lot of electricity.
Porquoi?
playstation 4
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just stick a human brain in a bucket.
Yeah, we tried that already . . . but brains in buckets tend to attract too many zombies . . . you end up spending way to much money on ammunition for gun shots to the zombie heads . . . though, the sysops seem to love the action.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Well then. I'm sure people will go with the more traditional routes of terrorism, theft, and tax evasion to get a one on one session with the government. After all, it just seems easier.
My 19" laptop has a super man logo on it...
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
It would have to be where a network connection of any usable speed is impossible.
BTW, just how big is a steady, 60 KWh solar panel? It appears to require several thousand (around 4,000 100 Watt panels in the mid-atlantic region (and suitable battery infrastructure) to generate 60 KWh for 24 hours a day (1.44 MegaWatt/hours for every 24 hours).
The above is from http://www.batterycountry.com/ShopSite/sec.htm
Ken
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?
But will it run Crysis? But in all seriousness, BEOWULF OF DSs!
It would have to be where a network connection of any usable speed is impossible.
Clearly this supercomputer is intended for an autonomous killing machine... a terminator, if you will. As such it doesn't not need a massive network connection, just enough to control some servos really. At 19" this component would compromise the torso of the machine.
BTW, just how big is a steady, 60 KWh solar panel? It appears to require several thousand
Perhaps, but this machine will no doubt will contain some type of nuclear power core.
Why would DARPA want this? Maybe they want a AI that can navigate aircraft or gound vehicles? BTW, I think it's ironic that autonomous operation seems easier to develop for aircraft than for ground vehicles when you consider that pilots get way more respect than the average municipal bus driver.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
So now we know what the hardware requirements for Windows 10 are going to be.
Given this is the government would I still get funding if I developed a computer that was capable of 50 Gwatts per FLOP?
Lots of funny ones there, but I think Hannibal Lector did the captions:
The "I've eaten what I study" badge.
Recipients have prepared their object of study as a cuisine item for eating. Hopefully, the minority of MDs are ineligible for this one. (J)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The government has spent way too much money wiring up huge quantities of commercial off-the-shelf processors and issuing press releases about its great accomplishments, which mostly reflect having money and being willing to spend it with a minimum of imagination, insight, and risk. I'd love to know where they got these goals. I sense a briefing from IBM about three-dimensional chips and microfluidic cooling, and all the wonderful things they could do if only the heavens started pouring forth money. I hope someone else is in the game, but it's hard for me to imagine who.
get rich or die trying!
I can think of at least three ways off the top of my head. They're not likely to knock on my door. It's really not hard if you think about it.
You start with the smallest core that achieves your goal, and the largest, thinnest wafer you can get. And then you stack them with through-silicon vias. Include holes for liquid nitrogen coolant or even high-rate gaseous cold helium. Get a cool interconnect like 12xQDR infiniband or something custom, but it can be done. Connecting the silicon to external interfaces requires gold wire, an electron microscope, and infinite patience but it can be done.
How hard was that? Do we need to draw them a map?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Supercomputers, and computers in general, are becoming a more significant percentage of our total power usage. By demanding more efficient power for their supercomputer, DARPA are insisting in more power efficiency in general because their technology does "filter down" to the rest of us. So, if they get their efficient supercomputer, we'll get PCs that operate at under 3 Watts and give us the same utility your 1KW gaming monster does today.
And that's going to impact the building of windfarms, hydro dams, salmon habitat, nuclear energy, coal fired plants, and a good number of other things. Good on 'em.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Forget about computing FLOPS and instead first consider this a thermodynamic problem.
Solve the thermodynamics, find a little space for CPU cores, solved.
Coupled with the power source this thing on the field would have a huge heat signature that would work like a beacon for enemy missiles I guess, but I will gladly be corrected by any reader that served on the armed forces and have a better idea.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
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.
Which only shifts the heat to somewhere else, by using power, creating even more heat.
I don't think that is what they want. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Just for some reference, an Intel Core 2 Quad can throw down about 50 gflops, but it runs on 95-130 Watts of power. To even come close to this 50GFLOPW number, you'd be designing your own HPC chips for sure.
http://www.pctechguide.com/26quadCore.htm
stuff |
The first computers was as big as supercomputers are today. Today these computers would fit inside a peanut.
The day today's supercomputers will fit inside a 19" box, will be the day an everyday user will need that kind of power.
It would have to be where a network connection of any usable speed is impossible.
Having a network connection to a traditional room-filling air-conditioned supercomputer isn't an alternative unless they only want a couple of these, which I doubt is the case (on a side note I'd guess the input bandwidth they need isn't that great - probably just real-time video/voice).
I think it's more a matter of wanting to have this sort of computing power available in the field on a potentially widespread (not one-off) scale. They probably have in mind things like AI and advanced image/pattern recognition for robo-warrior type applications.
When you don't want to have to put a nuclear reactor in the tank that the supercomputer is going to be shoehorned into. (As a higher-up poster suggested).
I'm sure the Army would like all the IT/InfoWarfare abilities that comes with a prepared Command post in their field HQ, and still be able to run off of the truck mounted generators they use now.
Power is a BIG concern in field operations, as you can't count on being able to tap into the local grid, as it may be unstable due to fighting (like Iraq, though it wasn't stable to start with), or entirely nonexistant (like Afganastan).
Ah, so Trickle Down Economics is a crackpot idea when conservatives use it, but if you're using it to argue for "Green" causes, it's now en vogue? I moved and the hassles with changing your address in the system means I don't get the memos for what fads are Morally Superior.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Watt = Joules per second.
They want 50 gigaflops per Watt.
50 x 10^9 floating point operations per second per (Joules per second).
= 50 x 10^9 floating point operations per Joule.
That part of the specification does not have a time dimension.
Enjoy :-)
(Ok, then they specify the Wattage which brings time back in...)
I want one tooo
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cus.gus@hotmail.com
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Don't give that robot a weapon, as it usually will shoot you or others in your party, or bystanders...thus starting a fight with the whole town(especially likely in New Reno), etc... ...or give him a gauss rifle and set his combat mode to berserk. Good fun!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I could probably pull that off - 19" is fucking insane.
They call it hardware because its fucking hard to do. You can't just recompile a motherboard or a thermal solution if you screw it up.
Its not the years, its the mileage
*drawing diagrams and writing equations on blackboard, puts down chalk, and posts on /. while looking over shoulder at camera, grinning maniacally*
'And I'm working on a BeoCoyote Supercluster to finally catch that Roadrunner!
Acme's new Multicore Coyote(tm) chips RULE!!!!!
It will work this time!
signed,
Wile E. Coyote, Super-Genius
P.S. 'Meep! Meep!' my ass!'
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I'll bid the entire contract for $15,000. The only catch is it's going to take me 18 years to deliver and I require payment up front. Checks payable to Dr. Gordon Moore.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)