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.

Comments

Those are called FPGAs

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Those are called FPGAs

[Gravis Zero]

The problem is that FPGAs are really expensive. Neural networking chips are going to be the death of FPGAs because they can be made with cheap-o fab systems.

Re:Those are called FPGAs

[Anonymous Coward]

No they're not because FPGAs and neural networks are different architecturally and serve different purposes.

It's an accelerator chip

[tietokone-olmi]

An application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC. Not a new type of CPU.

Content Addressable File Store

[Alain Williams]

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.

Re:Content Addressable File Store

[CustomSolvers2]

I found very interesting the following part in that linked page:

disk storage with built-in search capability. The motivation for the device was the discrepancy between the high speed at which a disk could deliver data, and the much lower speed at which a general-purpose processor could filter the data looking for records that matched a search condition.

It makes me wonder about the actual applicability of an approach which I never considered before (note that I am mostly software concerned and my hardware background isn't too solid): might it be worthy to create custom hardware architectures exclusively focused on maximising a limited amount of scenarios?

Shouldn't search-engine (or other internet-based, data-intensive) companies, for which the money isn't an issue, do some research on this front to know whether building customised architectures exclusively caring about the limited actions performed by their main algorithms (quickly searching, retrieving and storing) might be a good idea? Not just optimising or re-designing databases, but creating whole database-focused servers completely from the ground up?

Re:Simple question

[slew]

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.