It's quite likely that a supercomputer the likes of Skynet from Terminator will not be developed in the foreseeable future, but nevertheless, that's not stopping DARPA from trying, as they've just awarded a team led by NVIDIA a research grant of $25 to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing."

So, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, awarded the four-year research contract under its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covering 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.

"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. 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.” said Bill Dally, NVIDIA's chief scientist and senior vice president of research, and the team's principal investigator.

""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. 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," added Steve Scott, Cray's senior vice president and CTO, and the Cray principal investigator on the team.


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