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Comments: 200 +- News: DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer on Saturday June 27 2009, @04:40PM
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coondoggie writes "If you can squish all the processing power of, say, an IBM Roadrunner supercomputer inside a 19-inch box and make it run on about 60 kilowatts of electricity,
the government wants to talk to you. The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week issued a call for research that might develop a super-small, super-efficient super beast of a computer. Specifically, DARPA's desires for Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) will require a new system-wide technology approach including hardware and software co-design to minimize energy dissipation per operation and maximize energy efficiency, with a 50GFLOPS per watt goal."
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These aren't normal scientists... (Score:5, Funny)
57KW air-cooled 19" Rack? (Score:2)
You must be joking. That's like packing in 30 2KW electric fan heaters into a rack, obstructing the airflow with a ton of other junk and praying it won't melt. Good luck with that.
Re: (Score:2)
A KW of heating power is a lot different from a KW of processing power I imagine. Especially if some of that power is for refridgeration.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but we're not talking about a room, we're talking about the confined space of a rack. Nothing was said about not being able to produce heat, as long as it gets out of the case before the hardware fries.
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Never mind actually, someone in another thread has pointed out the obvious: that this is a rack, not 1u of a rack :) 57kw in a rack is probably quite doable.
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IANAP, but... how much of that 15kw is used locally in processing though, versus transmitted as energy/signals to another network node?
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Exactly. There are always incredulous responses to this kind of challenge. Everything is impossible. Until it's not anymore. That's research, that's progress. There's no better way to get people to innovate on crazy shit then to tell them it's almost impossible.
Could at least editors have a look at TFA? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a 19" _rack_, not _box_. As in, the standard (non-telco) datacenter rack size, accomodating up to 42U, 19" wide.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
19" tower and space elevator in one (Score:5, Funny)
Two! Two! Two projects in one!
Parent
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So seven projects then?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How tall does this rack have to be? :-) ) so this makes the standard rack able to contain a little over 6 feet worth of hardware, or 185ish cm. Of course the rack itself is usually a bit taller since it has a base and some fans on top (let me stress: usually).
Typically 42 Rack Units, as I said in the original post. A rack unit is 1.75" (and we use them even here in Europe so at least servers fit in racks, fortunately
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
hmmm... fits in one rack and has enough processing to do word recognition on all of the calls coming in to one telephone central office simultaneously. I wonder what they want a whole bunch of these for?
No problem (Score:5, Funny)
Just stick a human brain in a bucket. It's small, quiet, cool and just feed it a Cheeto every once in a while to keep it running.
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Well, since Darpa also wants the operating system to be self aware, that's a start.
Re:No problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Just stick a human brain in a bucket. It's small, quiet, cool and just feed it a Cheeto every once in a while to keep it running.
And since the human brain has a computational power of 100 petaflops at 20 watts [movementarian.com], it'd well exceed DARPA's requirements.
Parent
Re:No problem (Score:5, Funny)
And since the human brain has a computational power of 100 petaflops at 20 watts, it'd well exceed DARPA's requirements.
Only before you subtract the power used to think about pr0n. Or you can use a female brain, it'll no nuclear on you only once a month.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What happens if we use an Ab Normal brain?
Zombie bait (Score:2)
Just stick a human brain in a bucket.
Yeah, we tried that already . . . but brains in buckets tend to attract too many zombies . . . you end up spending way to much money on ammunition for gun shots to the zombie heads . . . though, the sysops seem to love the action.
Going against Resistance is futile. Sidestep it. (Score:3, Interesting)
60,000 watts? (Score:2)
Is that all they're allowing? Power nazis.
Where will be that cabinet? (Score:2)
If i could do that (Score:2)
Do you think id admit it and have the Feds take it from me for nothing and classify it? No thanks.
And for the record, it wouldn't be that hard to do, as long as you wanted a semi-dedicated supercomputer and not a general purpose box.. But no, i wont tell you how, even if i was authorized.
Thermionics and stuff (Score:2)
Pack thermionic converters between the components. They'll help cool and recover some power from heat back to power. They can be on the board, or placed on a cover over it in such a way as to fit between the board components. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/electricity-1205.html [mit.edu]
Build in parallel processing with 16 processors, 4 on each side of a 4D-cube, as in the Connection Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine [wikipedia.org]
Three boards, stacked. Top, thermionics on the underside fitting between the
NVIDIA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I imagine they will build something along those lines. Lots of highly specialised cores that can do Floating Point really well if it carefully compiled for them; some switches for some fast short-range network protocol probably and a few general purpose cores to manage things. Maybe some field-programmable components so that you can customise the hardware for new applications. The current nVidia Tesla series achieves around 1GFLOP per Watt, and you can get 1 TFLOP, consuming 1 KW per U, (ignoring host proce
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You're missing the point-- Darpa feels that it is ill served by current commodity supercomputers, and wants something revolutionary. The deadline for delivery is in 2017, so it's unlikely that today's tech comes close.
Fitting it in a 19 inch rack should be easy (Score:3, Funny)
Will fit inside your Car Analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Having such great computational power available to every single vehicle would open up a huge realm of possibilities: Combine it with sensors you could detect damage and minimize its effects by comparing the vehicle's response to a detailed finite element model. You could do on the fly aerodynamic analysis, allowing a fighter to keep performing to it's best even after damage has significantly altered it's shape. You could manage the control of thousands of actuators, allowing you to create a shapeshifting walker out of programmable matter [wikipedia.org], and you could definitely do learning/optimization algorithms that would allow for an AI capable of a significant amount of learning. Combine this with the amount of image processing it could do, and you're very near a completely autonomous, smart enough combat vehicle.
While it's a too big for a man portable system, with work, you could fit such a device (and a power source) into something as small as a motorcycle or a somewhat scaled up iRobot Warrior [irobot.com]. That's not much more than man sized. It may not be a T-800, that much computation in that small size and power envelope is enough build a near-man sized autonomous fighting vehicle that can see, learn and adapt with an endurance on gas of several hours. It's a bit frightening to consider.
--sabre86
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But where, exactly, would the batteries that can push 60 kilowatts go? I don't think they would fit in the trunk of a Mazda Miata with this magical imaginary computer.
Or more importantly, batteries that can push 60 kW for any period of time. I think that with enough cells, which you can make about as small as you want, you might get the power, but you definitely won't have the energy to run it for anytime whatsoever. The energy density is nowhere near good enough. But, Sticking with the Miata example, there's easily enough power under the hood to drive both the car and the computer, particularly with a high output option like the BPT [wikipedia.org]. You just need a generator, like the
Alternate way to get one (Score:3, Funny)
aka (Score:2)
playstation 4
I have one (Score:2)
Hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
So now we know what the hardware requirements for Windows 10 are going to be.
The company who were closest have gone broke (Score:4, Interesting)
A firm called SiCortex was selling just this sort of compact, energy-efficient supercomputer. They shut down a few weeks ago because an investor pulled out.
It's a damn shame, they had really cool stuff. If I was Johnathon Schwartz I wouldn't have pissed away $1 billion on MySQL (it was worth maybe $10 and a stick of gum), I would have been out the front of SiCortex banging on the door with a chequebook.
Oh well.
It's doable, but too expensive (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually probably quite doable, but would be filthy expensive.
Most people don't realize, but digital electronics is way, WAY ahead of what you get in your home PC, if you're willing to pony up the cash.
For example, non-Silicon based semiconductors often outperform the good old standard stuff significantly. Silicon is by no means the fastest, it's just the cheapest. Gallium Arsenide and Indium-based materials can both clock many gigahertz higher than Silicion for the same process size and power dissipation. They're toxic, fragile, and the largest wafer sizes are tiny, so not exactly mainstream, but available now.
The real performance king though is the Rapid Single Flux Quantum [wikipedia.org] process, which can go over 100 GHz easily. It's used in things like radio telescope amplifiers and high-performance DSPs for military radar. Sure, it requires liquid helium cooling, but it also only requires milliwatts per gigaflop, so it's just about the only technology that'll let you squeeze a petaflop into a box and not have it melt into slag. That still means you'd need something like a kilowatt of cryogenic cooling, which is nontrivial, but still, I'd say it's doable with a bit of engineering wizardry.
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19 inch box?
The IBM Roadrunner:
"occupies approximately 6,000 square feet..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner [wikipedia.org]
Good luck with that...
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17" tower? 3.8 GHz?
I'm sure the thinkers of 1941 would be shocked to know what we can do now, given they were running 10 Hz on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Redefine a Gigaflop. Say 1 billion floating point instructions per century.
Gigaflop doesn't even have a time dimension.
Re:Simpler solution. (Score:5, Informative)
Are you on drugs? Sure it does: FLoating point Operations Per Second.
Hint - they're looking for a machine that can do 50 gigaFLOPs. Such performance is always measured per unit of time. Same as 1 horsepower is 550 foot-pounds per second.
If you google for it yourself, you can keep your beginners-level trainee deck swab geek card :-)
Parent
Re:Simpler solution. (Score:4, Informative)
That's right -- gigaflops has a time dimension.
Gigaflop, on the other hand, doesn't. One gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations. One gigaflops is a billion floating-point operations per second. Contrary to "obvious" rules of grammar, the "s" isn't pluaralization, it's the unit "seconds".
Parent
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Supercomputer performance is always measured in FLOPs per second.
Sorry, as a guy who has built supercomputers (not the piddly CoW type either) and now consults on them on a daily basis, I can tell you that's not true. Common, but not an "always" worthy of bolding - dhrystones and whetstones and their modern versions in SPECint, SPECfp and their _scale counterparts and mcalpin's STREAM benchmark which reports bytes/s in addition to flops. Not every FLOP is created equal which is why more sophisticated measurements exist.
In fact, it is precisely because of my experience
Re:Yeah sure (Score:5, Funny)
19 inch box?
They didn't say how high.
In other news, progress on a space elevator has been confirmed. Curiously, it's 19 inch wide.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, my first thought on this was whether perhaps those were the requirements to get the things inside every AT&T-style NSA listening room.
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Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!
That sounds like a nice bumper sticker. For the rear bumper.
Re:extreme scientists (Score:5, Funny)
Back *waaaaay* off, man. I'm an *extreme* scientist!
Oh, yeah? Where's your badge [scq.ubc.ca]?
Parent
Re:oblig (Score:5, Funny)
Grendel wouldn't stand a chance!
Parent
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That's 50A at 120V. A very common and standard config is to have two 20A PDUs in a rack, so 50A isn't that much of an increase. You do need an efficient cooling setup, but it's nothing that most commercial datacenters couldn't handle.
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By my calculations 1 m^3/sec of air can carry away 65kW at a 50 degK temperature rise. That's doable, though you don't want it exhausting into your office.