November 7, 2018 | International, C4ISR
OUTREACH@DARPA.MIL
11/1/2018
Parallelism – or the act of several processors simultaneously executing on an application or computation – has been increasingly embraced by the microelectronics industry as a way of sustaining demand for increased system performance. Today, parallel computing architectures have become pervasive across all application domains and system scales – from multicore processing units in consumer devices to high-performance computing in DoD systems. However, the performance gains from parallelism are increasingly constrained not by the computational limits of individual nodes, but rather by the movement of data between them. When residing on modern multi-chip modules (MCMs), these nodes rely on electrical links for short-reach connectivity, but once systems scale to the circuit board level and beyond, the performance of electrical links rapidly degrades, requiring large amounts of energy to move data between integrated circuits. Expanding the use of optical rather than electrical components for data transfer could help significantly reduce energy consumption while increasing data capacity, enabling the advancement of massive parallelism.
“Today, microelectronic systems are severely constrained by the high cost of data movement, whether measured in terms of energy, footprint, or latency,” said Dr. Gordon Keeler, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “Efficient photonic signaling offers a path to disruptive system scalability because it eliminates the need to keep data local, and it promises to impact data-intensive applications, including machine learning, large scale emulation, and advanced sensors.”
Photonic transceiver modules already enable optical signaling over long distances with high bandwidth and minimal loss using optical fiber. Bottlenecks result, however, when data moves between optical transceivers and advanced integrated circuits in the electrical domain, which significantly limits performance. Integrating photonic solutions into the microelectronics package would remove this limitation and enable new levels of parallel computing.
A new DARPA program, the Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, seeks to enable future system scalability by developing high-bandwidth optical signaling technologies for digital microelectronics. Working across three technical areas, PIPES aims to develop and embed integrated optical transceiver capabilities into cutting-edge MCMs and create advanced optical packaging and switching technologies to address the data movement demands of highly parallel systems. The efficient, high-bandwidth, package-level photonic signaling developed through PIPES will be important to a number of emerging applications for both the commercial and defense sectors.
The first technical area of the PIPES program is focused on the development of high-performance optical input/output (I/O) technologies packaged with advanced integrated circuits (ICs), including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Beyond technology development, the program seeks to facilitate a domestic ecosystem to support wider deployment of resulting technologies and broaden their impact.
Projections of historic scaling trends predict the need for enormous improvements in bandwidth density and energy consumption to accommodate future microelectronics I/O. To help address this challenge, the second technical area will investigate novel component technologies and advanced link concepts for disruptive approaches to highly scalable, in-package optical I/O for unprecedented throughput.
The successful development of package-level photonic I/O from PIPES' first two technical areas will create new challenges for systems architects. The development of massively interconnected networks with distributed parallelism will create hundreds to thousands of nodes that will be exceedingly difficult to manage. To help address this complexity, the third technical area of the PIPES program will focus on the creation of low-loss optical packaging approaches to enable high channel density and port counts, as well as reconfigurable, low-power optical switching technologies.
A full description of the program is available in the Broad Agency Announcement. For more information, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/HR001119S0004/listing.html
April 14, 2022 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR, Security
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has joined the Washington-based venture capital firm Red Cell Partners as a partner and chairman of its national security practice, the firm announced Wednesday.
January 3, 2019 | International, Aerospace
Loren Thompson Sometime in the very near future, probably this month, the U.S. Army will announce the winner of a competition to develop a new engine for most of the service's helicopters. Called the Improved Turbine Engine Program (ITEP), it is a multibillion-dollar effort that has often been described as the Army's top aviation modernization priority. It isn't hard to see why. The weight of Army light and medium helicopters has been growing by 70-100 pounds per year since they debuted in the last century as new equipment, munitions and armor were added. As a result, both the Black Hawk utility helicopter and the Apache attack helicopter are under-powered when operating in “high-hot” conditions, meaning above 6,000 feet in temperatures of 95 degrees or greater. Such conditions are common in places like the Persian Gulf, and pose a challenge to conducting missions successfully. In 2006, the Army launched an effort to develop an engine that could provide 50% more power than the existing General Electric T700 engine (3,000 versus 2,000 shaft horsepower), while reducing fuel consumption by 25% and extending the life of the engine 20%. That in itself was a tall order, but the new engine also had to fit into thousands of fielded helicopters with minimal modifications, and it couldn't weigh more than 500 pounds (the current engine weighs 456 pounds). The Army also wanted each engine to cost much less than the T700–not just in the cost of manufacturing the new engines, but in the cost of maintaining them across a multi-decade service life. Given these very demanding requirements, and a dearth of money for modernization during the Obama years, it isn't surprising that a dozen years passed before the Army felt it was in a position to pick a design that met all the service's needs. But now it is. The choice is between a successor to the T700 built by General Electric Aviation, and a competing design offered by a joint venture of Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney (a unit of United Technologies, and contributor to my think tank). The decision has probably already been made, and simply awaits formal announcement later this month. Full article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2019/01/02/armys-decision-on-huge-helicopter-engine-program-will-impact-ge-honeywell-united-technologies
July 19, 2023 | International, Naval
The new vessels feature greater cargo and fuel-carrying capacity than their predecessors, with an eye on supplying France's aircraft carrier.