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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)
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.
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
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
So now we know what the hardware requirements for Windows 10 are going to be.
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.