NVIDIA-Led Team Receives $25 Million Contract From DARPA to Develop GPU HPC Systems

[btarunr]

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.

[Phxprovost]

well i guess nvidia just found their source of future income

[pr0n Inspector]

"crisis in computing"?

Sounds like something Jeremy Clarkson would say.

[DrPepper]

Seems like the USA is making some kind of heat based weapons system.

[AphexDreamer]

Originally Posted by DrPepper

Seems like the USA is making some kind of heat based weapons system.

lol

Or they want to bake the worlds largest cookie.

[hat]

Maybe we're going to take down the enemy by connecting this device full of hot, power hungry GPUs to thier power grid...

[Bjorn_Of_Iceland]

I smell delays for next gen nVidia gpus.. diverting resource to this priority project

[HossHuge]

Originally Posted by DrPepper

Seems like the USA is making some kind of heat based weapons system.

Originally Posted by AphexDreamer

lol

Or they want to bake the worlds largest cookie.

Originally Posted by hat

Maybe we're going to take down the enemy by connecting this device full of hot, power hungry GPUs to thier power grid...

You guys are funny..

[DriedFrogPills]

or does DARPA want to hurry up the impact of global warming? with a fermi based HPC setup the emissions would pale into nothingness compared tot he direct effect the fermis have

[undeadx]

military research is a waste of money, but 25 million is very small compared to billions spent developing weapon/waging war by the usa, but ironically, they never been considered a threat even with large amount of military resources.. see this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_expenditures i think its too much..

[AphexDreamer]

Originally Posted by undeadx

military research is a waste of money, but 25 million is very small compared to billions spent developing weapon/waging war by the usa, but ironically, they never been considered a threat even with large amount of military resources.. see this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_expenditures i think its too much..

Wow USA needs to spend some of that money to college students who can barley afford to go to school and less on how to kill people.

[AsRock]

Originally Posted by DrPepper

Seems like the USA is making some kind of heat based weapons system.

Give me the giggles...

Originally Posted by AphexDreamer

Wow USA needs to spend some of that money to college students who can barley afford to go to school and less on how to kill people.

O come on if there is anything America and UK is good at it's pissing in the air with tax payers money.

[hat]

Liberal much? Good luck running your gov't subsidized schools when someone decides to invade, and oops, we spent all our money building our country and not enough on defense and now we're getting our asses kicked...

[DrPepper]

Originally Posted by undeadx

military research is a waste of money, but 25 million is very small compared to billions spent developing weapon/waging war by the usa, but ironically, they never been considered a threat even with large amount of military resources.. see this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_expenditures i think its too much..

I agree the internet is a complete waste of money.

[$ReaPeR$]

why only Nvidia? isnt that partial? i dont think that any country should work in that way.. organise a contest and let the best win.

[undeadx]

Originally Posted by hat

Liberal much? Good luck running your gov't subsidized schools when someone decides to invade, and oops, we spent all our money building our country and not enough on defense and now we're getting our asses kicked...

i understand that we do need to spend money in military but as you can see on the list usa military expenditures is 6 times more than nearest rival china, so china is going to invade usa? i think its more to usa will "invade" other countries.. even with 5 other top countries combined its still half of the usa total military expenditures, so dont say its not enough resources for the military.. and we are not talking millions or hundreds of millions here, its 663 billions in 2009 and guess what, its close to 700 billions (estimated) this year..

[KainXS]

If military research was a a waste of money we'd all be nazis

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

[hat]

Originally Posted by undeadx

i understand that we do need to spend money in military but as you can see on the list usa military expenditures is 6 times more than nearest rival china, so china is going to invade usa? i think its more to usa will "invade" other countries.. even with 5 other top countries combined its still half of the usa total military expenditures, so dont say its not enough resources for the military.. and we are not talking millions or hundreds of millions here, its 663 billions in 2009 and guess what, its close to 700 billions (estimated) this year..

You'd best be trollin'. I can think of a few other things the gov't did that cost shittons of money and was worthless... like, gee, I dunno... the stimulus bill?

[Mistral]

Originally Posted by hat

Liberal much? Good luck running your gov't subsidized schools when someone decides to invade, and oops, we spent all our money building our country and not enough on defense and now we're getting our asses kicked...

Yeah, Canada is just aching to enter through your back door...

Originally Posted by KainXS

...I think we have wasted more on wars recently, in the priceless lives of soldiers

This I always find it a bit odd to read/hear. "Priceless lives of soldiers"? Isn't the possibility covered in their job description? How about "priceless lives" of civilians? Hell, just compare how many die in traffic accidents each day...

---------

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.

[link2009]

Originally Posted by undeadx

military research is a waste of money, but 25 million is very small compared to billions spent developing weapon/waging war by the usa, but ironically, they never been considered a threat even with large amount of military resources.. see this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_expenditures i think its too much..

I'm sorry but this is the most uninformed statement I've heard in a long time.

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).

[mlee49]

I bet $100M that MIT will be the people to actually solve the "problem". They have already taken computer architecture to a new level.

[dir_d]

I work at a defense contractor and a 25 million dollar contract is nothing the actual profit on government contracts is usually 8% to 10% The rest of the money is billed to the contract in payroll supplies hardware or whatever. This contract is for 4 years...they arent making any money on this at all unless its 25 million per year.

[Kreij]

Originally Posted by dir d

I work at a defense contractor and a 25 million dollar contract is nothing the actual profit on government contracts is usually 8% to 10%

Unless you are selling $48,000 toilet seats and $10,000 hammers

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.

[CharlO]

"Crisis in computing"

Because we are gonna need a shitload of PC to run Crysis 2. Obviously the note is about that.

[DrPepper]

I'm curious why AMD didn't get the contract since they're more efficient in everyway really ?