The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has rewarded a research team lead by NVIDIA with a 25 million dollar grant for developing GPU technologies that can be used by so-called exascale supercomputers.
DARPA implies a minor crisis considering the crunching power needed today. The anwer is supposed to be supercomputers that are 1,000 more powerful than the ones we have today and with 1 Trillion calculations per second these are called exascale computers (exa = 1018).
The tools for reaching this level of performance is believed to be found in our graphics circuits and therefore DARPA has granted the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) project 25 million dollars to research the GPU technology required to hit exa levels of performance.
“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,” sa Bill Dally, NVIDIA chefsforskare och Senior Vice President för forskning, och gruppens ansvarige övervakare
The team is lead by graphics circuit developer NVIDIA also include several big companies and organizations like Cray and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Several American universities are part of the development of both hardware and software.
One of the first prototypes of exa supercomputers are expected to stand ready in 2018 and on top of the research team NVIDIA is working with, the UHPC program also include three similar contracts where, among others, Intel is invovled.
That Intel has every reason to continue its research with Larrabee and the MIC architecture is becoming all the more obvious.
