Supercomputer Program Progresses

Signal, Jan 2007

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched the third phase of a program to develop new, affordable supercomputers for use by the U.S. government. The goal of the High-Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program is to create a new generation of economically viable computers for the national security and industrial communities.

To initiate the program's third phase, DARPA selected Cray Incorporated (www.cray.com) and the IBM Corporation (www.ibm.com) to complete the designs and technical development of very large, or petascale, supercomputers. For their phase III efforts, Cray was awarded $250 million and IBM received $244 million. DARPA defines petascale computers as machines capable of performing more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second (petaFLOPS) and containing the necessary bandwidth and memory to operate complex, real-world applications at that scale. The HPCS program seeks to develop computing systems capable of two petaFLOPS sustained performance and scalable to more than four petaFLOPS.

Both Cray and IBM have a December 2010 deadline to demonstrate functional, productive prototype systems that can be scaled to meet the program's goals. The prototype systems developed under the HPCS initiative will be at least one-quarter of the size required by DARPA's partners: the National security Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Nuclear security Agency.