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DARPA Funds Development of New Type of Processor (eetimes.com)
The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is funding a completely new kind of non-von-Neumann processor called a HIVE -- Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit. According to EE Times, the funding is to the tune of $80 million over four-and-a-half years, and Intel and Qualcomm are participating in the project, along with a national laboratory, a university and defense contractor North Grumman. From the report: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Richland, Washington) and Georgia Tech are involved in creating software tools for the processor while Northrup Grumman will build a Baltimore center that uncovers and transfers the Defense Departments graph analytic needs for the what is being called the world's first graph analytic processor (GAP). Graph analytic processors do not exist today, but they theoretically differ from CPUs and GPUs in key ways. First of all, they are optimized for processing sparse graph primitives. Because the items they process are sparsely located in global memory, they also involve a new memory architecture that can access randomly placed memory locations at ultra-high speeds (up to terabytes per second). Together, the new arithmetic-processing-unit (APU) optimized for graph analytics plus the new memory architecture chips are specified by DARPA to use 1,000-times less power than using today's supercomputers. The participants, especially Intel and Qualcomm, will also have the rights to commercialize the processor and memory architectures they invent to create a HIVE. The graph analytics processor is needed, according to DARPA, for Big Data problems, which typically involve many-to-many rather than many-to-one or one-to-one relationships for which today's processors are optimized. A military example, according to DARPA, might be the the first digital missives of a cyberattack.
Computers are machines that help us think. If we can think better, we can do all the rest of those things you are talking about much, much easier. I would say more and better computing power is the only thing that is going to elevate us out of the purely biological drive to expand until collapse.
bend like the reed
cure cancer, mitigate climate change
To be honest, this processor design might have applications for both.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster!
Thats the worst backronym I have ever heard.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Nope. The later would require DARPA to develop a MIP processor, optimized for solving millennial imaginary problems.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster!
Is there such a thing any more? I recently had access to a lot of second-hand low-end machines and thought it'd be fun to set up a cluster, but I couldn't find the software - it had vanished into a haze of different distros.
Amen. DARPA should instead focus on things that matter; such as studies on gender inequality, and the apparent inability of the English language to express any notion that is not perceived as racist and misogynistic by the media. The government should instead spend time identifying the race gender and sexual identity and occupation of everyone alive and focus on how they have been marginalized by evil racist trump supporters who luv Russia and want to destroy mother earth. This is how we should conduct science in the future.
Always remember that you are right and everyone who disagrees has been brainwashed.
Cancer cures, global warming, Mars colonization. All those are pushing computer simulations to their max today. A better processor that could truely "multitask" would be a huge leap in toolset capability for any of those fields.
> Graph analytic processor (GAP)...
Well I think this could be the solution to massive social surveillance, imagine you can solve a huge graph of targets and they relationships.
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
People are incapable of pure logic. Computers don't help a person think, they help a person learn via a desktop calculation or from what's hopefully a trusted data pool, or they help reason what a person already knows. The problem is, the media can't make any money and politicians lose footing if people think logically. Search engines and social media like Google and Facebook "bubble" and so people only get an affirmation and rarely are exposed to alternative views. Say what you want about Twitter not taking down hateful tweets, but good for them because they are one of the last few unrestricted places to post anything. But as long as the Internet doesn't become self aware and creates a class system, we might be ok. Though with cloud computing, unless you enjoy being limited as an interface designer, you will have no real control with what's coming in a few years. I have no problem with new hardware as long as it doesn't impede my ability to go completely offline and still get work done. The problem with new tech though is it's constantly leaning more towards benefiting servers only every year.
I remember a guy doing that with 50 Raspberry Pi's.
They use big data algorithms for medical research. See "folding@home". There's a lot of data out there that needs to be processed, and processing more medical / chemistry data means trying out more combos and quicker / better results. A customized processor that does a specific type of task far faster than traditional processors is a great investment.
BTW: "the new arithmetic-processing-unit (APU) optimized for graph analytics plus the new memory architecture chips are specified by DARPA to use 1,000-times less power than using today's supercomputers."
A supercomputer designed to scale better for big data processing, that uses 1000 times less power than current supercomputers. Thus, it has 1000 times less cooling needs. Currently we're effectively using networked PCs scale up to fill data centers for our processing needs. A system designed with big data in mind will knock the socks off the current set ups and lead to much more efficient and scalable big data processing for ALL industries and research needs.
And the reason it needs government funding is because then it's an open platform that anyone can use, instead of locked down with patent lawsuits for decades. This way, it gets built by the best of the best from multiple companies and it's openly publishable technology. The free market gave you Comcast and Verizon, it's DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place.
The problem we have currently is that we are focused on creating specific types of circuits. What we should be doing is working on dirt-cheap generic circuits that can reconfigure into anything you want aka neural network chips. The advantage of these is that you can have flaws in the fabrication process and make up for it by just making a shitload of identical neurons. You could even make up for having a low speed system by having an ungodly number of neurons in a single machine. This opens the door to using low fabrication resolution to build monstrously deep silicon chips with thousands of layers.
The future is massive amounts of generic circuitry.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
High performance computing is important to national defense. In fact, most computer technology was developed for weapons systems and national defense. Short term profit driven corporate group-think precludes taking the necessary risks to develop new computer architectures that are orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. It is government funded research that often makes important advances possible.
BTW, I have mod points but think you have a fair question.
Now if you are going to question why we need to spend so much on weapons, we'll that would be a fair question...
Greed is the root of all evil.
Generic chips that can be programmed in to anything you want in the field. It's a huge industry, they get used in everything from your car to your TV, but they have limitations that means they are never going to be a be-all, end-all.
There's a place for processors, FPGAs and ASICs, usually all combined.
DARPA is an acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They spend our money on defense and weapons research.
I'm not saying your other priorities are unimportant, but you shouldn't expect DARPA to fund non defense related research.
Greed is the root of all evil.
There's distributions out there like ROCKS for rolling out the software side of clusters quickly.
Why exactly shouldn't this be available for anyone in the US to commercialize? Intel certainly doesn't need more IP fodder to further their monopoly abuses. If anything, their right to hold IP at all should have been voided long ago.
On the minus side, they will create Skynet or something more insidious, with slimy humans in charge.
On the plus side, isn't this how you would make hardware ideal for a raytracer? Fixated on memory, a big heap of global memory (can't really dice the memory locality too much, rays have to go all over in the whole scene) with huge bandwiths flying everywhere, and you just want do zillions of intersections.
The "Graph Acceleration Processor" could operate on e.g. a sparse octree, to give a simple example?
I would like if someone more knowledgeable can give some thought or insight.
In the 90s we still thought we would have a flying car, but that may take the second place to real-time raytraced games! That's what we will play in the future. After the Nintendo that's as powerful as a Silicon Graphics..
An application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC. Not a new type of CPU.
From TFA:
"The four-and-a-half-year DARPA program will spend the first year with Intel and Qualcomm designing rival architectures, while Georgia Tech and PNNL design rival software tools. After the first year, one hardware design and one software design will be chosen. DARPA will provide the company with the winning hardware design with $50 million in funding, on the condition that the company kick in $50 million of its own. DARPA will also provide $7 million to the organization that provides the winning software design.
Meanwhile, Northrup will be given $11 million in non-matching funds to set up the Baltimore center to survey all of the Defense Department needs in graph analytics and make sure that the hardware and software builders meet those needs."
This is fairly common for DARPA - have an initial bake off phase with then pick a winner to go further. Developing new technologies is risky and expensive and I'd be willing to bet that if there are any cost overruns, the government isn't throwing in any more money. The hardware vendors probably see this as important technology to develop for the future no matter what and they're happy to get a bit of cost offset from the government with what are likely to be very few IP restrictions and a pretty modest 16 node (on a single board) deliverable.
Northrup makes out pretty well, too, for what seems to be a vaguely defined survey and needs oversight role.
OK, I'm not making any judgments whatsoever about this new architecture, but...ANY radical change in our "accepted" mode of thinking cannot help but be a GoodThing(TM) - ultimately - IMO. $.02
This reminds me of the Content Addressable File Store that ICL developed some 50 years ago. OK: different implementation, but today a huge amount of RAM is affordable whereas CAFS needed to search for the data on disk.
Can anyone explain how this research and development benefits anyone at all?
Overtime and contracts to look after the nuclear weapons stockpile.
Ensure the existing weapons work.
Simulate using the existing weapons.
See what upgrades can be done.
Simulate the new upgrades.
Design nuclear weapons systems.
Simulate their use.
Decades of contracts and new work.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Oh BeauHD, are you sure it's not Northrop Grumman? Neither North Grumman nor Northrup Grumman seem to be real corporations...
And the reason it needs government funding is because then it's an open platform that anyone can use, instead of locked down with patent lawsuits for decades. This way, it gets built by the best of the best from multiple companies and it's openly publishable technology. The free market gave you Comcast and Verizon, it's DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place.
If only. Typically as part of the deal, DARPA contractors (like Intel and Qualcomm) are allowed to patent (and own the patents) used to commercialize the technology. That may or may not mean an open commercial platform, but it certainly doesn't mean they won't get to own patents on key parts of the technology to potentially keep competitors at a disadvantage.
>This is a waste of money that could go toward studying how to cure cancer
As a bioinformatician, I strongly disagree. Most of my work is dealing with sparse graphs (called networks). Strangely most of my work is based on the same mathematical and computer science principles than intelligence services.
I'm not saying your other priorities are unimportant
I think that the parent AC is actually implying that these other priorities are less important or, at least, heavily misused and systematically brought out of context. By using a more Slashdot-friendly reply: WHOOOSH!!
:)
DISCLAIMER: I am plainly sharing some properly-understanding help. I have no relationship whatsoever with this other AC and am not implying that I (dis)agree with anything of what is expressly or implicitly said in any of the previous posts.
DISCLAIMER TO THE DISCLAIMER: logically, I have some opinion about all this, but my point is that it is completely irrelevant here as far as my contribution is only meant to address what I think that is a real-intention-misinterpretation problem.
DISCLAIMER TO THE DISCLAIMER TO THE DISCLAIMER: I am not implying that people concerned about certain issues are usually misinterpretation-prone and require lots of unnecessary-for-any-properly-understanding-individual clarifications.
etc.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I doubt it's possible unless they have a *very* large number of threads they cycle between so a mem issue is fulfilled when the issuing thread finally gets its turn again.
Even that doesn't make much sense. Memory access seems to be the core of most bottlenecks, am I supposed to believe it's gone now.
I'd like to be proven wrong.
DARPA is an acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They spend our money on defense and weapons research.
And as a bonus, it sounds very close to DERPY.
Ezekiel 23:20
DARPA money funded the invention of the Internet. I'd argue that the Internet certainly helps the efforts of curing cancer, mitigating climate change, and colonizing Mars. Computers that do critical tasks 1000 time more efficiently would be a fundamental breakthrough that could help all these efforts and many more.
Greed is the root of all evil.
one can learn without thinking or vice versa? Huhh never thought of that.
Wrong issues for wrong org, also all the studies / solutions don't mean jack if you can't implement it. Social problems are inherently next to impossible to solve.
I'm appaled at all the "what's the use of this?" posts. When the principles behind lasers were discovered, they were regarded a physical curiosity with no real practical consequences. It's almost the definition of fundamental research that you can't immediately see the applications - else it's applied research. And DARPA's very mission is to fund research that currently borders on science fiction but one time may have practical consequences. They also played a big role in the development of what would eventually become the internet. With this HIVE project (horrible acronym BTW), they're even being quite conservative, as one can easily see a host of potential applications that are quite relevant to society.
"What's the use of this" is exactly the wrong question to ask when it comes to funding science/tech. Yeah, it's something populist politicians like to wave around, but in reality, fundamental research pays for itself as a driving force for future economic growth. There will be failed projects that get nowhere and are never heard of again (except in arguments to cut funding), but the success stories easily make up for them. To again cite a very conservative example that is a bit in the gray zone between "fundamental" and "applied": think of Xerox putting a bunch of smart people together at PARC and giving them an allowance to fool around with.
One could even argue that the generous funding with few questions asked that existed in a "distant" past has helped the US to be at the forefront of tech for decades.
A 1000x rate is fake because it is not doing a comparison to another general purpose machine.
How do they think of how to build an inexistent "operating system" for this specific processor? Same question for inexistent compiler, assembler, linker, debugger, profiler, hex-editor, ...
I think that they will use "64-bit CP/M" because it's the most simple. And cross-compilers also.
Take a look at neo4j.com. When you organize graph-like data as a graph instead of the typical set of relational tables, you can vastly speed up certain kinds of queries, and thinking about the solution becomes much clearer.
This is generic technology with uses far outside military applications. My own needs are for event correlation, and finding the cause in amongst a lot of data telling you the effects of a systems outage.
Marry graph databases to a CPU that is specially tailored for this kind of work and you get a powerhouse.
Cloud providers such as AWS can then bring in these machines, virtualization them, and in a cost effective manner rent them out to everyday developers.
So what can YOU do with it?
"The free market gave you Comcast and Verizon, it's DARPA that gave us the internet in the first place."
You must be American. The Brits, Germans, French, Finns, Irish, Russians, hell, even the bloody Australians at Wollongong were developing some of the fundamental technology behind "The Internet" decades ago without one dime from ARPA, or the later DARPA.
The United States did _not_ invent the Internet. Yes they played a significant part in its development, but it would have happened, and was happening, anyway.
I remember when the first April 1st "gorby@kremvax" post made the rounds on USENET. Yes, it was a joke posting, because everybody _knew_ that the Russians didn't have Networks or Computers. Well, everybody, meaning Americans, were wrong. We were in constant email contact with our colleagues at Dubna at that time. Their VAXstations weren't that much different from ours. They bought them from the same company that we did- DEC in Galway.
Your "Free Market" may have given you Comcast and Verizon. If you don't mind, would you keep them to yourselves? We've heard the horror stories...
Again, I have to point out that ARPA and later DARPA funded some of the US part of the Internet. It was happening elsewhere anyway, without a dime of US Government money.
Americans... many of them still believe that they were the first to put a Man in Space.
You do know R&D for transistors were first funded as defense contracts in order to improve radars right? And the first computers were also defense contracts to do ballistics calculations. It gave all these private companies the expertise and tools to pave the way to what we have today... What a waste that was right?
This kind of weird name is given to pie-eyed future technology projects so that when the dust settles no-one really knows precisely what didn't pan out.
Because odds are, they're going to have to fund this again—with an inkling of clue & a vaguely comprehensible name—before this twinkle finally deposits a nugget, third time lucky.
Everyone knows that.
He's an American, therefore....
Can anyone justify the value of this research and development?
You get all the terrorists and find all the US citizens that have been involved with them. That's all.
That is not very much for these companies. The product will not be a big seller, a small fab less player could probably do better.
This smells like an academic exercise that will lead to nothing.
Back when I was in university for engineering, I had a professor tell us that there was nothing better than Von Neumann architecture so don't bother looking for it. One has to wonder what else university professors are wrong about.
These chips would be perfect to analyse many to many relationships of its citizens in real time. Every gathering will be checked for threat analysis.
Might not want to invite your non-white non-christian friend to your next wedding... we saw how they deal with weddings in that leaked drone footage....
There is no such thing as "1000-times less". One times less power would be zero. (If a processor used 1 Watt, then this would use a 1000 times less, as in -999 Watts?) And one thousandth of the original is NOT the same as a thousand times less.
You can have a thousand times more, but you can't have a thousand times less!
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