NVIDIA and Others Get $25 Million to Make GPU-Based Supercomputers

NVIDIA has been, for some time, going on about the benefits that GPU computing modules can bring to High-Performance Computing applications. Several supercomputers that employ the massive parallel processing capabilities of such solutions have already emerged. Now, apparently intrigued by the possibilities offered by such things as NVIDIA Tesla products, DARPA has decided to invest a significant sum in the making of such applications.

DARPA stands for The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Defense Department's research and development arm. Its project will have the $25 million supplied to a group composed of NVIDIA, Cray, six top US Universities and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These members will have to develop new hardware and software meant to boost GPU computing performance, reliability and programmability. Unfortunately, the six universities involved have not yet been named. Finally, DARPA also awarded contracts to three other teams meant to study UHPC systems. Prototype systems should be completed by 2018.

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

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