The US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) is investigating extreme supercomputing wanting to take high perfromance computing to the next level of supercomputing, funding development of a new breed of 'ubiquitous' supercomputers that will be smarter and faster and smaller and key issue, require much less power.

Officials believe such computers will be necessary to make sense of the avalanche of data that coming from tomorrow's network-tethered sensor systems. Current computer systems will not be able to handle the load.

DARPA is considering the possibility of starting a new program to guide and fund development of such systems, tentatively named the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program. Recently its Information Processing Techniques Office issued a request for information on a proposed program structure and goals.

"The UHPC program is seeking solutions that will explore the technologies and architectures required to enable the development of revolutionary computing architectures and systems and overcome 'business as usual' advances," the RFI states. "This can only be achieved via dedicated investment, hardware/software co-design, integrated design techniques and continuous innovation."

Such a system would use far less power than today's systems. DARPA would like it to be able to execute 50bn floating-point operations/sec per watt power. Each floating-point operation in that scenario could run at under 20petajoules per operation, a small margin on thousands or even tens of thousands of petajoules now required to carry out such an operation.

The system would have much smarter software. Programmers would not  worry about underlying hardware, making program writing much easier. The OS and runtime solutions will have to “behave like a self-aware system that 'learns' to address a particular problem by building self-performance models, responding to user goals, and adapting to changing goals, resources, models, operating conditions and even to failures," states the RFI.

DARPA envisions a five phase programme. The first will fund development of conceptual designs. By the second phase, an execution model will be detailed, along with metrics to gauge the success of a system built from the model. Phase three involves a full-scale system simulation. In the fourth phase, winners of the UHPC awards will deliver specification based systems. Finally, a fifth phase will involve modifying and refining the designs.