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

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Prentice,

I find it rather naive that you seem to believe that only a specific  
organisation can 'invent' a specific idea.
Especially if that's a defense organisation the thought is pretty  
hypocritical.

What defense organisations has brought us more than anything else is  
global espionage at a massive scale and 3 million people
in the USA working for 1000+ different intelligence agencies who keep  
each other busy (CIA operatives abroad not counted),
as wikileaks has explained to us.

I prefer a more open society than that - your choice evidently is  
that of a military closed culture with no acceptance of any form of  
criticism.

I'd say one of the things stopping HPC more than anything else is  
government organisations keeping things under their hat.

On Dec 19, 2012, at 4:06 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

>
> On 12/19/2012 12:21 AM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Vincent,
>
> I find it ironic that you are using the Internet to criticize DARPA,
> considering the Internet was created by DARPA, and was no doubt
> developed through similar DARPA grants to other technology companies.
> And the Internet would have never taken off if DARPA hadn't been open
> about the technology so that others could connect to the Internet and
> extend and evolve the technology.
>
>
> --
> Prentice
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