On June 21 DARPA, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced the latest in its recent spate of high-end computing efforts, the Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) program. This effort will award investigators up to a maximum of $3M over three years to build hardware that will be needed by the systems activities undertaken as part of DARPA’s Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program. And like the UHPC program, OHPC is being managed out of Bill Harrod’s Transformation Convergence Technology Office at DARPA.

Harrod is swinging for the fences again this time: according to the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA), “Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.”

The goal of this program is to accelerate the UHPC program (which has a deadline to field prototype systems by 2018) by conducting research and development on technologies that are critical to that program, either in whole or in part. UHPC is structured around a set of goals that will motivate the technologies developed through OHPC