While the US has plenty of representation in the current TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, it lost the #1 slot to China’s Tianhe-2 several years ago. President Obama wants to fix that immediately.
One day, as I surfed the web on my laptop and lamented how long it takes a YouTube video to load, I found myself wondering if employees of the US government are also beholden to the same congestion and shoddy peering that affects everyone else on the internet. Surely, as hundreds of scientists at Fermi Lab near Chicago wait for petabytes of raw data to arrive from the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, they don’t suffer interminable connection drops and inexplicable lag. And, as it turns out, they don’t.
In a turn of phrase that seems designed to provoke headlines, the US Department of Defense this week said one of its primary goals is to “take the ‘man’ out of unmanned” combat. This quote and much more comes from the latest in the Department’s ongoing series of Roadmap to the Future reports, which seek to lay out both the current realities and future plans of the US military and defense industry.
Have you ever wondered why a supercomputer is called a supercomputer? Is it the number of processors or the amount of RAM? Must a supercomputer occupy a certain amount of space, or consume a specific amount of power?
DARPA, the US military’s research wing, has a problem on its hands: Satellites, unmanned drones (UAVs), and myriad other worldwide sensors are so ubiquitous and omnipotent that the Department of Defense (DOD) doesn’t actually know how to make the best use of them.