Hybrid Computing in the News
by Michael Hay on June 28, 2009
I ran across this today on Slashdot and Network World.
“These challenges cannot be pursed independently at the component level such as processor, memory and network switches; they must be addressed as an integrated solution. Co-design of the system hardware and software that is driven by processing requirements for selected application domains is essential. Solving individual challenges will not result in viable system solutions, DARPA stated.”
The article further goes on to state that the current trend of increasing the clock speeds and explicit parallelism controls by system programmers are not desirable in the required design. To me this really means what, yes ladies and gentlemen hybrid computing systems. In short the designers will have to look at everything CPUs, FPGAs, software, compilers, assemblers, IDEs, etc.
Here’s a link to the original request on DARPA in PDF form.
Comments (2 )
sanjeev on 01 Jul 2009 at 9:30 pm
this kind of project can only be run by NASA or MIL as it requires huge funding. I think DARPA will be completely disruptive technologically.
Michael Hay on 02 Jul 2009 at 12:19 am
Sanjeev, glad to know that you think this is the case. I would tend to agree with you here. Usually super computing platforms that make it into the national labs or the military tend to find all of or some portion of their technologies migrated into the commercial sector in about 5 years. IBM BlueGene technology is available for commercial purchase now and that was originally designed for the national labs.
