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When it comes to computing technology, the research goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency can be summed up in two words: power and speed.
In the latter category, Sun Microsystems Inc. yesterday announced
that DARPA has awarded it up to $44.3 million to spend on research on
the use of optical technology to speed up communications between
different microprocessors in a system.
The project, which is
scheduled to take five and a half years to complete, is aimed at
developing what Sun described as virtual macrochips: arrays of low-cost
processors that function as one device and can deliver increased
computing performance with the help of silicon-based optics.
Chips
that are soldered together wire to wire typically communicate at
between one-tenth and one-twentieth the speed of light, whereas optics
can support connectivity at a near light speed. The idea of using
optical communications to increase the speed at which data moves
between processors isn't new. Just last week, in fact, IBM announced that its scientists have built a switch that uses pulses of light
to control the flow of information on chips, a development that it
touted as a step forward in efforts to create on-chip optical networks.
But Ron Ho,
a Distinguished Engineer at Sun who is part of the team assigned to the
macrochip research project, said that a key issue for the researchers
will be reducing the amount of energy consumed by the use of optics in
chips. "You can't exploit the power of optics without bringing the
power way down," Ho said. "That's the risk that DARPA is trying to
address with this program."
As part of the project schedule, the
Sun researchers have set goals to continually reduce the amount of
power used in what is, essentially, a form of wireless communications
between chips. A related goal set by both Sun and DARPA is sharply
reducing the cost of the optical connections.
Aside from making
it easier to create supercomputers, the macrochip concept should help
lower technology costs, according to Ho. For instance, he said that if
there was a problem with any processor in a multichip array, it could
easily be removed and replaced. That isn't the case now with chips that
are physically connected to one another.
Macrochips using optics also could bring enormous performance gains to supercomputers, which is another goal
of DARPA. The agency has a separate project under way to boost the size
of supercomputers, and in 2006 it awarded $244 million to IBM and $250
million to Cray Inc. to fund the development of petascale systems. The two companies are scheduled to have prototypes ready by 2010.
Sun's
work on optics likely won't result in the addition of new technologies
to the company's business systems for several years, at least. "It's a
very interesting area of research, and I think two or three years would
be extremely aggressive for this to turn up in a product," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64 in Saratoga, Calif.
Building
multicore processors also increases the size of chips. But Brookwood
said that optical technologies could enable chip makers to remove
memory devices from the processors, thus helping to keep the chips from
growing too large.
Read the original article: http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=hardware&articleId=9071661&taxonomyId=12&intsrc=kc_top
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