Exabytes for Defense Military Information Technology (03/08/07) Vol. 11, No. 2, Gerber, Cheryl
as it appeared in the March 16, 2007 edition of ACM TechNews.
High-performance systems that exceed the capabilities of today's fastest supercomputers are being developed by Department of Defense research labs and their industry collaborators. The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is working on the Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration (LD JCTD) with SGI and its third-party providers, with a focus on the ability to recover, store, and exchange huge amounts of information among global users. The demonstration will involve remote access, manipulation, and viewing of massive federal and commercial data sets and a mingling of technologies and operational concepts. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program has entered its third phase of development, and DARPA partners IBM and Cray will supply highly scalable systems that will convert petabytes to exabytes of data and vastly improve application development productivity. Accuracy, speed, and ease of use are the core areas of concentration in HPCS Phase III, and among the DoD applications the systems will support are computational materials science for the discovery of new, superior substances, operational weather and ocean prediction, aircraft/seacraft engineering, weapons design, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance processes that call for multiple sensor outputs. Cray's contributions to the project include the Chapel high productivity language, an enhanced performance analysis tool, and new software debuggers, while IBM is supplying Power 7 servers with development tools for productivity and performance usability augmentation, the Advanced Interactive eXecutive operating system, the General Parallel File System, a high-performance computing HPC software stack, and interconnect and storage subsystems. Exciting growth in the HPC market is one of the central goals of the DARPA program, while both the DARPA and NRL efforts aim to employ current technology to realize the maximum viability of large data systems. Click Here to View Full Article
