SCIENCE

Reservoir Labs and Intel Corporation have signed a subcontracting agreement that brings Reservoir Labs research scientists and technologies to Intel's team developing Extreme Scale computing technologies in DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) research program.

The goal of the UHPC program is to develop 1 PFLOPS (HPL) single cabinet systems, including self-contained cooling, that overcome significant energy efficiency, security, and programmability challenges. Essentially this can be viewed as integrating the computational capacity of today's largest supercomputers in 100x less area, with 100x less power, and with significant increases in programmability and applicability. Such computing capabilities will be able to be embedded in ship, land, and air-based DOD systems. The benefit to DOD will be qualitative increase in capabilities in areas such as Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR), Electronic Warfare (EW), Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD), battle management and planning, and cyber security.

Intel's UHPC team will develop technologies that will enable the United States to build Extreme scale computers by the year 2018. This will require breakthroughs in hardware and software design beyond those expected from technical development via current commercial approaches. Many breakthroughs will be to improve energy efficiency of computation by more than 100x.

In addition to a leading team of mathematicians and computer scientists, Reservoir Labs will be bringing its advanced R-Stream optimization software to the effort. R-Stream uses operations research techniques and advanced polyhedral mathematics spaces to generate efficient choreographies of computation over parallel computing hardware that minimize communication delays and save energy. Reservoir will use R-Stream prototypes to help Intel Corporation shape its Extreme scale system designs.

Intel's research contract with DARPA specifies a program to develop "proof of concept" Extreme scale technologies and an initial system design by 2012. The proposed subsequent Phase II, if DARPA chooses to continue, will develop critical technology demonstrations and a completed system design for 2014, and if full scale development is pursued the delivery of an Extreme scale technology prototype system for 2018.

Richard A. Lethin, Ph.D., president of Reservoir Labs, said "it is a great privilege to have been invited to join Intel's Extreme scale research team and to work with distinguished innovators in computing such as Shekhar Borkar, the project's principal investigator. I am particularly excited about the opportunity for Reservoir to contribute so directly to the advancement of so many sciences at a fundamental level by working to develop the next generation of the world's most powerful and efficient computing devices, in this prestigious DARPA research program."