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Petaflops? DARPA Seeks Quintillion-Flop Computers
coondoggie writes "Not known for taking the demure route, researchers at DARPA this week announced a program aimed at building computers that exceed current peta-scale computers to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. Dubbed extreme scale computing, such machines are needed, DARPA says, to 'meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, system dependability, and security.'"
From TFA, written by Michael Cooney and propagated by the summary:
It looks like these "extreme scale computing" systems are needed before things like "ease of programmability" can be acheived. I call bullshit.
The actual notice from DARPA is named Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC). From the first paragraph of that page:
That makes a lot more sense.
Now, will someone please go and smack Michael Cooney up the back of head for writing like that?
Call me tinfoil hat wearer, but me thinks they want a faster way of cracking encryption...
Quintillion is not an SI prefix. The next step after Peta is Exa.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Call me when they get to googleflops ;-)
I'm glad DARPA is finally making a move to make their computing more animal friendly.
I want to run Crysis 2 in software rendering mode
Summation 2
I, for one, welcome our new Skynet overlords. :)
Domestic signals processing. All of them.
X-tream scale, mind altering computing...
That was we can simulate nuking out enemies faster than they can simulate nuking us.
Or they could come up with climate models that are actually almost somewhat predictive.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Holodeck porn.
They come up with ideas that only ultra-geeks and science fiction nerds could come up with, and then they get billions in funding for it! It's like paradise. The fact that they're actually successful at advancing human technology is just icing on the cake.
Norton bogs my computer down too but that is just crazy :)
First, I'm entirely ignorant of supercomputing. I don't know the first thing about it. I'm asking this out of sheer lack of knowledge in the field:
What do you need a computer that fast for?
I mean, specifically, what can you do on something that fast that you couldn't do on one 1,000 (or 1,000,000) times slower? What kind of tasks need that much processing power? For example, you normally hear about them being used for things like weather simulation. Well, what is it about weather simulation that requires so much work?
The whole idea is fascinating to me, but without ever having even been near the field, I can't imagine what a dataset or algorithm would look like that would take so much power to chew through.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The DOE as well as Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories already have programs in place to develop an "exascale" system by 2018. ( the date at which Moore's law predicts the possibility of such systems )
/. stories here and here.
The top companies competing for the government funds are, not surprisingly, IBM and Cray.
See these two older
jdb2
According to the article: "Specifically the outfit is looking for:
*skipped the first 4*
Self aware system software, including operating system, runtime system, I/O system, system management/administration, resource management and means of exposing resources, and external environments."
Uh-huh. This is it! Is it no coincidence that it's called Omnipresence high performance computing?
...for hellaflops.
pedoflops? How many priests equals one pedoflop?
you know, like the background image debacle or buzz
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Apple is the ONLY company that can bring the future of computing into reality.
Think different. Think better. Think Apple!
The extra digits wouldn't have fit in the twitter annoucement so they decided to settle for a bit less.
[...] to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.
Say what you want, but here in the continent I live a million billions is still a trillion, not a quintillion.
I think we're OK. Maybe.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That's a little odd, changing from SI prefix (metric), which uses mostly Greek words (Petaflops), to short scale, which uses Latin (Quintillion-Flop).
Since their current petaflop systems are clearly not enough for them, can I pick up a few for $5 a piece at their next salvage sale?
Is how many Eve Online clients does the NSA need to run at one time?
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
Pfff, old news. It will produce 42 as final output, and then we'll have it build another machine capable of performing one peta-quazillion calculations per second.
You should realise that the "S" stands for seconds. Okay - it doesn't matter that much, but this is meant to be a technical site. The editors should really get this stuff right.
To build an even more powerful computer that will answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything!
I'm gonna do what I want and I'm gonna get paid -- Tom Waits
a beowulf cluster of these...
I can't believe I'm the first to post this tired old meme.
Things it can do:
Assuming 1 flop = 1 calculation INCrement
A 1 Exaflop super computer can iterate through 2^64 integers in 18 seconds
Assuming 16 flops = 1 encryption key check AES 512
A 16 Exaflop super computer can check every possible password (95 characters ^ 10 characters long) in 1 minute
This super computer can crack pretty much any human readable password.
Things it can NOT do:
Even Exaflops of compute aren't enough to crack a 128 bit pseudo random encryption key (2 ^ 128 is just too big). Neverminde 256 or 512 bit.
Let me help you cut to the chase. The answer is "42," okay?
In actuality, the correct term is "exaflop." This is widely accepted vocabulary in academia - especially in Computer Science. I've never read a single paper with the kind of terminology you are ascribing to "haste". "Quintillion FLOPs" doesn't even make sense, as FLOPs are an abstract unit, not physical objects. The only flops that number in the Quintillions are those directed by Uwe Boll. Perhaps next you'd like to inform me that only the "really smart people" use the term Billihertz instead of Gigahertz? If that's the case, then us "dumb" people will let you continue on your genius-like way.
They should buy a data center and fill it with D. E. Shaw's special purpose hardware for doing particle simulations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer) , and instead of proposing grants for new software development, propose grants to keep the data center's queue full of interesting chemical simulations to run.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
So the government is wanting to buy something that can finally crack all the Skype traffic in real time and play Crysis at full settings at the same time.
I bet you it'll be available in something smart phone sized in 20 years.
"How did they ever get along with only 8gb RAM, a quad core CPU.?!"
"My Casio watch I threw away last year had more than that!"
Yes, ominously the article states that it will be running a "self-aware OS".
I'm of the view that there's a good chance that current or near-future supercomputers would be able to simulate a human brain in real-time. This is because there's an awful lot of computational redundancy in real brains, given what they're made from, and given their need to self-construct.
All that's needed is to reverse-engineer the algorithms used by each part of the brain, and to properly connect them up.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those !
What is really needed is faster *bus speeds*. So many CPUs just sit around waiting for data that sits across the bus. That's where the dramatic throughput improvements lie. Pretty please, DARPA? :)
Everyone knows that we don't need more then 640k.
quintillon.... why not just use the available SI Prefix (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix).
After petaFLOPS, it's exaFLOPS.
that comes up with the R&D money for this stuff? Where are the "free market" entrepreneurs that neo-liberal economists are always blabbing about?
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
The fact that the NSA is still serving a purpose in spite of 'completely secure' key sizes should suggest a fairly obvious conclusion.
Sweet. Stupidity by obscurity. Shall we integrate the area under the curve of obviousness * tinfoil_coefficient?
There is an obvious conclusion, but apparently it's not obvious. It's one of those cases where whichever answer you presently hold seems obvious, until one discovers an even more obvious answer. The parent post has been careful to distance itself from any clue as to which rung on the ladder of obviousness it presently occupies, a strategy which suggests an entry level rungs. Think of the cost. I certainly wouldn't want to be a large enough blip on the threat radar to find myself at the center of an exaflop computation. I value my keratin.
Feynman in Joking has a chapter on safe cracking. He ultimately concludes that "cold cracking" is largely a myth. Almost every safe cracker starts with an in: tampered mechanism, partially guessed combination, faulty mechanicals.
The bulk of what your average cyber TLA computes would be simple traffic analysis, which at that scale, is probably not so simple, and involves correlating across networks (cell, internet, house of poozle). One wonders how many initial demerits one earns by connecting through a known onion router.
Next you have attacks against keys with weak initial entropy, key leakage, or sloppy key management (betcha that's a growth industry). Any cipher which purports to send random bits can be hacked to leak key bits (secretly) in the apparently random nonce values. It's nearly impossible to prove your cipher isn't doing this without access to the source code all the way down to the CPU microcode, and beyond. Huh, a funny thing happened to our masks on the way to the foundry, but the chips seem to run great. From a TLA perspective, this is a useful advantage, because what you end up with is not a level playing field. What you can crack by brute force, someday soon your adversary can also crack by brute force. It's a lot more fun when you have to peel off the anonymous brown wrapper.
What seems obvious to me is that your average TLA enjoys hiding behind this obviousness meme, and might even participate in its dissemination as a part of a highly successful initiative in distracting paranoids and shallow thinkers from useful analysis. You just have to find a forum where seeming clever is more important than being clever, add water, and stir.
My favorite local coffee shop is right beside the schizophrenia resource center. If I had the right social hacking skills, I could accomplish this mission by buying the right person who drifts into the coffee shop with a wifi netbook a free coffee a day. "Just keep posting buddy, the Joe's on me."