[Beowulf] DARPA issues 20 MUSD grant to nVidia to go from 1 GFLOPS/Watt to 75 GFLOPS/Watt

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

On 12/18/12 8:29 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>
>On Dec 18, 2012, at 5:16 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>
>>
>>>> 7 nm gives a factor 16 boost over 28 nm, in theory. So the
>>>> derived truth from the article points me to double precision.
>>
>> I don't think there's a heck of a lot of "truth" to be derived from
>> that short article. The DARPA MTO site gives more meaningful
>> details on what they're looking for.
>
>Just like you I doubt that's the real reason for the grant.
>
>To me it seems like that Nvidia promises something to DARPA but it
>isn't clear to me what Nvidia has to give back.

I imagine they have periodic reports, if nothing else

>Only when we would see the signed contracts we know - and i bet those
>are locked away.

Nope.. Procurement documents and contracts are publicly available. They're
posted on some website, but I don't remember where.
>
>In the meantime they just post around bla bla stories, the usual way
>in how army guys work...
DARPA is fairly straighforward in their stuff.. At least as long as it's
not classified.

They may not publish in obvious places, but the info is available if you
hunt around.  Don¹t forget it's an enormous bureaucracy, so things take a
long time to propagate through the system.  DTIC is where most of the
stuff eventually winds up, but it could easily be a couple years to get
there. 

Early results probably get published at conferences. Figure a year to do
some work, 6 months from submitting the paper to the conference happening,
and another 6 months for the proceedings to be available.


>