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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."
...They're EXTREME scientists!
19 inch box?
The IBM Roadrunner:
"occupies approximately 6,000 square feet..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner
Good luck with that...
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!
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)
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.
Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!
Oh, yeah? Where's your badge?
Grendel wouldn't stand a chance!
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 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.
19 inch box?
They didn't say how high.
In other news, progress on a space elevator has been confirmed. Curiously, it's 19 inch wide.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
The downwash from the rotors on the black helicopter its mounted on should help.
But will it run Crysis? But in all seriousness, BEOWULF OF DSs!
By my calculations 1 m^3/sec of air can carry away 65kW at a 50 degK temperature rise. That's doable, though you don't want it exhausting into your office.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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?
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.
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.
Redefine a Gigaflop. Say 1 billion floating point instructions per century.
Gigaflop doesn't even have a time dimension.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Supercomputer performance is always measured in FLOPs per second.
Sorry, as a guy who has built supercomputers (not the piddly CoW type either) and now consults on them on a daily basis, I can tell you that's not true. Common, but not an "always" worthy of bolding - dhrystones and whetstones and their modern versions in SPECint, SPECfp and their _scale counterparts and mcalpin's STREAM benchmark which reports bytes/s in addition to flops. Not every FLOP is created equal which is why more sophisticated measurements exist.
In fact, it is precisely because of my experience that I recognized your error of using "gigaflop" in the first place and made fun of you for doing so, its an extremely common error. One that anyone who does work in the high performance computing arena would recognize off the bat.
While you don't need a humor transplant, you do need an augmentation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.