Tuesday, August 10th 2010
NVIDIA-Led Team Receives $25 Million Contract From DARPA to Develop GPU HPC Systems
A team led by NVIDIA has been awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing." The four-year research contract, awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covers work to develop GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers which will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers.
The team -- which also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six top U.S. universities -- is being funded by DARPA to address the challenge that conventional computing architectures are reaching the practical limits of energy usage and will not meet the challenges of exascale computing. The research team plans to develop new software and hardware technology to dramatically increase computing performance, programmability and reliability.
"This recognizes NVIDIA's substantial investments in the field of parallel processing and highlights GPU Computing's position as one of the most promising paths to exascale computing," said Bill Dally, NVIDIA's chief scientist and senior vice president of research, and the team's principal investigator. "We look forward to collaborating to develop programmable, scalable systems that operate in tight power budgets and deliver increases in performances that are many orders of magnitude above today's systems."
"The DARPA UHPC program is attacking technical issues that are key to the future of high performance computing, from the embedded terascale to the exascale," said Steve Scott, Cray's senior vice president and CTO, and the Cray principal investigator on the team. "We are excited to be working with this team, and we believe the directions we are pursuing will lead to radical improvements to the state-of-the-art in the coming decade."
In addition to the NVIDIA-led team, DARPA awarded contracts to three other teams to study UHPC systems. Prototype systems are expected to be completed by 2018. The names of those universities on the NVIDIA team will be available once details with them have been finalized. For more information on the DARPA UHPC program, please go here.
The team -- which also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six top U.S. universities -- is being funded by DARPA to address the challenge that conventional computing architectures are reaching the practical limits of energy usage and will not meet the challenges of exascale computing. The research team plans to develop new software and hardware technology to dramatically increase computing performance, programmability and reliability.
"This recognizes NVIDIA's substantial investments in the field of parallel processing and highlights GPU Computing's position as one of the most promising paths to exascale computing," said Bill Dally, NVIDIA's chief scientist and senior vice president of research, and the team's principal investigator. "We look forward to collaborating to develop programmable, scalable systems that operate in tight power budgets and deliver increases in performances that are many orders of magnitude above today's systems."
"The DARPA UHPC program is attacking technical issues that are key to the future of high performance computing, from the embedded terascale to the exascale," said Steve Scott, Cray's senior vice president and CTO, and the Cray principal investigator on the team. "We are excited to be working with this team, and we believe the directions we are pursuing will lead to radical improvements to the state-of-the-art in the coming decade."
In addition to the NVIDIA-led team, DARPA awarded contracts to three other teams to study UHPC systems. Prototype systems are expected to be completed by 2018. The names of those universities on the NVIDIA team will be available once details with them have been finalized. For more information on the DARPA UHPC program, please go here.
39 Comments on NVIDIA-Led Team Receives $25 Million Contract From DARPA to Develop GPU HPC Systems
Sounds like something Jeremy Clarkson would say.:laugh:
Or they want to bake the worlds largest cookie.
but seriously, when if comes to every country nobody knows what they're spending, for example it says 692 billion, but there are projects that aren't even included in that still, same for china, same for britain.
I think we have wasted more on wars recently, in the priceless lives of soldiers
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On topic: it's a "four-year research contract". For all the worthy jokes, nV might have power hungry ovens right now, but in 4 years they shouldn't have problems producing something that the military finds efficient. All in all, good on them for landing a contract.
Military research has brought forth numerous technologies and theories that we use today. For example, think about the Earth's magnetic poles, we understood more about them and the seabed of oceans after the US military began scanning the ocean floor for enemy submarines.
As DrPepper pointed out, do you think ARPANet was created by some guys in their basement? (Think THE INTERNET).
Anyway, let's keep the discussion about the tech and not about the politics.
I think that if this kind of thing produces something substantial, it may have far reaching effects into the computer industry as a whole.
Because we are gonna need a shitload of PC to run Crysis 2. Obviously the note is about that.