14 DAY TRIAL // The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has reached its pocket and rolled out no less than $494 billion representing a four-year contract worth between them and IBM/Cray. The idea behind the money is to develop server clusters that will offer 100 times the performance of actual supercomputers while at the same time will use a simpler approach on the software's ergonomics.
The 3rd phase of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program specifies that the development of 2 Petaflops capable computer (with scaling capabilities up to 4 Petaflops) is a must.
IBM's own contract ($244 million) translates into a large profit for the company but it also means that a lot of work will be required in order to produce the software and hardware capable of Petaflops-size computations. Several areas such as the POWER7 processor, the AIX operating system, IBM's Interconnect and Storage Subsystems, IBM's General Parallel File System and IBM's Parallel Environment have to grow a lot until 2010 when they will be delivered to the contractors.
As for Cray's $250 million contract most of the money will be invested in the Cascade program, a new hybrid system architecture that will combine multiple CPU technologies, a high-performance network layer and an adaptive software environment into a single integrated system. Moreover, Cray will continue to develop its AMD Opteron and HyperTransport technologies.
"High productivity computing is a key technology enabler for meeting our national security and economic competitiveness requirements. High productivity computing contributes substantially to the design and development of advanced vehicles and weapons, planning and execution of operational military scenarios, the intelligence problems of cryptanalysis and image processing, the maintenance of our nuclear stockpile, and is a key enabler for science and discovery in security-related fields," stated Dr. William Harrod, DARPA program manager.
Curiously enough, this time Sun was left out of the deal. While the reasons for this move are unknown, Sun officials said that they plan to incorporate DARPA related technologies into their own server-based product lines.