SGI partners with DARPA, Intel and other industry leaders to deliver exascale supercomputer systems

FREMONT, USA: SGI is partnering with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intel and other industry leaders to develop a future computing architecture that will overcome the limitations of the current evolutionary approach.

DARPA’s Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program will develop an innovative, revolutionary generation of computing systems that will offer extreme performance and energy efficiency to deliver exascale supercomputer systems that meet the escalating demands of advanced computing.

“SGI is pleased to partner with DARPA and Intel on this groundbreaking program that promises to have far reaching implications for the supercomputing industry,” said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and chief technology officer at SGI. “To achieve the objectives of the DARPA UHPC program, we need to rethink how we are designing and building supercomputers. We look forward to a collaborative research environment that will result in major advances that redefine our industry.”

Department of Defense (DoD) sensors, platforms and missions depend heavily on high performance computing and, as they stand, conventional computing architectures are not equipped to meet future challenges and technical issues such as energy usage.

Consequently, future computer system designs must be developed to support new generations of advanced DoD systems, enable new computing application code, programmability and reliability and fulfill the need for greater processing performance.

DARPA’s objective with the UHPC program is to work with industry leaders to reinvent computing by developing new computer architectures and programming models that require less energy per computation. The resulting UHPC systems will be 100 to 1,000 times more energy efficient with higher performance than current computer architectures and will decrease the time needed to design complex computing applications.

Prototype UHPC systems are expected to be complete by 2018.