DARPA pushes new frontier of high-performance military computing

Military and Aerospace ^ | 6/22/2010 | John Keller

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Computer scientists at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are asking industry for novel technologies and approaches that offer dramatic advances in high-performance military computer performance, and enable so-called extreme scale computing -- the notion of exceeding today's peta-scale computing to achieve one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

DARPA released a broad agency announcement Monday (DARPA-BAA-10-78) for the Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) program to help develop tomorrow's high-performance computers to meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, dependability, and security in aerospace and defense computing for military sensors, platforms, and missions.

The DARPA OHPC program is to provide new computer technologies for a similar DARPA initiative called the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program to develop new classes of high-performance computing, from embedded computing to cabinet computing, with dramatically reduced power consumption while delivering a thousand-fold increase in processing capabilities. The UHPC program, under consideration now, is to develop adaptable and hardened cyber resilient computer systems that will not require significant system expertise.

The DARPA OHPC program seeks to speed-up the UHPC initiative with new research aimed at extreme scale computing, which also is known as exascale computing, and will develop technologies will be integrated into one or more UHPC systems.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Ping

[Magnum44]

yeah, but can it make beer?

[GreyFriar]

‘puter ping

[DBrow]

I bet it runs Halo without that lag...

[Woodman]

SkyNet

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

I think that some of the functions will be designing new nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons simulation.

[driftdiver]

“I think that some of the functions will be designing new nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons simulation.”

In a sane world perhaps. BO will have it counting polar bear farts.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

Those what military supercomputers do at Los Alamos,Lawrence Livermore and Sandia Base. They design nuclear weapons and nuclear simulation.

[driftdiver]

I know, thats what they used to do.

[ErnstStavroBlofeld]

As far as we know.

[BookaT]

Maybe it will be able to calculate the damage O has caused. I know, I know, that is incalculable.

[douginthearmy]

I’m quite certain noone will ever need more than 640 trillion. /s ;p

[zot]

Thanks for the ping.
This is the sort of thing DARPA was created to do.