{"170481":{"#nid":"170481","#data":{"type":"news","title":"DARPA Awards Georgia Tech Energy-Efficient High-Performance Computing Contract","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EATLANTA \u2013 Nov. 12, 2012 \u2013 Georgia Tech has received $561,130 for the first phase of a negotiated three-phase $2.9 million cooperative agreement contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) to create the algorithmic framework for supercomputing systems that require much less energy than traditional high-speed machines, enabling devices in the field to perform calculations that currently require room-sized supercomputers.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAwarded under DARPA\u2019s Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) program, the negotiated cooperative agreement contract (with options out to five years) is one piece of a national effort to\u0026nbsp;increase the computational power efficiency of \u0022embedded systems\u0022 by 75-fold over the best current computing performance in areas extending beyond traditional scientific computing. Professor David Bader, executive director of high-performance computing in the School of Computational Science \u0026amp; Engineering, is principal investigator on the Georgia Tech cooperative agreement, along with research scientist and co-PI Jason Riedy.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cPower efficiency is one of the greatest challenges confronting the designer of any computing system, much less one that\u2019s capable of this kind of speed,\u201d Bader said. \u201cWe could build this system today, but it would require megawatts of electricity\u2014enough to power a medium-sized city. Our goal is to deliver the same graph analytic\u0026nbsp;capabilities on platforms that require only watts or kilowatts.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ESuch a system would have benefits in energy conservation, of course, but it could also save lives. The tactical advantages of supercomputing in military situations\u2014quickly and comprehensively mapping individual or group social-media activity, for example\u2014are becoming more critical every day, and the capacity simply doesn\u2019t exist to deliver massive amounts of data from the field to a central computing system. Georgia Tech\u2019s objective is to bring supercomputer graph-analysis capabilities where they\u0027re needed, from vehicles to field hospitals and beyond. The project bears the acronym GRATEFUL: \u201cGraph Analysis Tackling power-Efficiency, Uncertainty and Locality.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn addition to power efficiency, the second priority is to maximize computational resiliency, meaning the product algorithms will be able to withstand errors at the application and even hardware level that could result from input error or environmental factors (such as weather and hardware damage).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBader and Riedy\u2019s task is to develop the algorithmic framework upon which these new embedded systems will operate, and they will consciously remain \u201carchitecture-agnostic\u201d so that the end product can be applied as widely as possible. Finally, like all programs funded under DARPA PERFECT, research and testing will be done in simulation rather than on actual embedded systems. GRATEFUL will be broken up into three stages: research \u0026amp; startup (18 months), risk mitigation (18 months) and prototyping (two years).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u201cOur goal is to make sure we have graph-analysis algorithms\u0026nbsp;that can manage issues across architectures,\u201d Riedy said. \u201cAnd we\u2019ll be looking at all the issues that concern hardware designers.\u0026nbsp;Today\u0027s platforms maximize the number of operations running at once, while these new platforms consider the most power-efficient levels of that concurrency.\u0026nbsp;These are not new concerns, but our job is to find new ways to deal with them.\u201d\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E###\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003EContacts\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EMichael Terrazas\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAssistant Director of Communications\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ECollege of Computing at Georgia Tech\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:mterraza@cc.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Emterraza@cc.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E404-245-0707\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"Goal is to create algorithms that carry supercomputing into the field"}],"field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EATLANTA \u2013 Nov. 12, 2012 \u2013 Georgia Tech has received $561,130 for the first phase of a negotiated three-phase $2.9 million cooperative agreement contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) to create the algorithmic framework for supercomputing systems that require much less energy than traditional high-speed machines. \u003Cem\u003ESource: Office of Communications\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":"","uid":"27174","created_gmt":"2012-11-12 12:28:01","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:13:10","author":"Mike Terrazas","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2012-11-12T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2012-11-12T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"47223","name":"College of Computing"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"4305","name":"cse"},{"id":"690","name":"darpa"},{"id":"13255","name":"david bader"},{"id":"15030","name":"high-performance computing"},{"id":"702","name":"hpc"},{"id":"11561","name":"IDH"},{"id":"49901","name":"institute for data and high performance computing"},{"id":"166983","name":"School of Computational Science and Engineering"},{"id":"167322","name":"supercomputing"}],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"39431","name":"Data Engineering and Science"}],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:mterraza@cc.gatech.edu\u0022\u003EMichael Terrazas\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ECollege of Computing\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E404-245-0707\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["mterraza@cc.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}