Sometimes revolutions start very quietly. DARPA’s Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program seems to fall into this category.
Last March the agency issued a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) requesting proposals from the HPC community to help develop extremely high performance computer systems using novel design approaches.
The goal is to achieve by 2015 a 1,000-fold increase in capabilities over today’s most powerful supercomputers such as Jaguar at Oak Ridge National Labs — Jaguar has a theoretical peak capability of 2.3 petaFLOPS/s and nearly a quarter of a million computational cores.