February 3, 2007
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Computerworld (01/08/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has embarked on a $650 million program to develop easy-to-use, high-performance supercomputers for both commercial and national security applications; the focus for DARPA is not just on the design of hardware, but also the creation of programming languages, development tools, and techniques for scaling applications across immense numbers of processors. William Harrod, the manager of DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems Program, says constructing such systems calls for a programming environment that "is easier to use and that has less of a learning curve than the environments on today's HPCs." In addition, the new systems will require an operating system and an architecture that yield efficient performance. There were five vendors vying for the development contract when the program started in 2002, and the list has been whittled down to two: Cray and IBM won the $500 contracts to devise "economically viable high-productivity" supercomputers by the close of the decade. The vendors are developing competing programming languages--Chapel from Cray and x10 from IBM--to address current limitations. "There will be one language at the end of the day, and the government, multiple companies and HPC user communities are going to have to put in some effort to adopt [it]," said Cray CTO Steve Scott.
For the complete article see http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=278337
Posted by rab5 at 03:47 PM
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