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Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

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Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#61

Post by losteric »

bantunes wrote: post #14

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

Versus, what? No public funding? No private utilization of public research? Public research should fall in the public domain, free of IP and open for any use.

If anything, we should be doing more of this... create dedicated academic R&D funding streams by taxing established or dying industries in order to publicly explore new fields, and use X Prize-style programs or NASA's COTS/CRS programs to incentivize private commercialization. America needs jobs, what's better than creating new industries?

Plus, public investment in R&D has a good track record. This study from 1980 [1] indicates a $17 return over 18 years for every $1 invested in NASA - 1700% ROI. Returns depend on programs and the administration in office, but similar numbers can be obtained from other programs (NOAA and agricultural, military and medical research, etc). R&D is speculative, but most programs do much better than breaking even.

[1] https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/economics.html

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#63

Post by convolvatron »

antoinealb wrote: post #3
Frenchgeek wrote: post #2

"Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor: Worlds First Non-Von-Neumann " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture ?

Was my thought as well "What? AVR are harvard architecture and I can buy them for 0.1$". But after looking, apparently it is more linked to new parallelism paradigms: > "This non-von-Neumann approach allows one big map that can be accessed by many processors at the same time, each using its own local scratch-pad memory while simultaneously performing scatter-and-gather operations across global memory."

processors with cheap and limited local memory and costly and scalable external memory are also not new....and that doesn't really make them non-von-neuman except that it doesn't make sense to execute out of global memory

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#64

Post by Sean1708 »

empath75 wrote: post #12

Is it just me or is the illustration of 'graphs' of totally the wrong kind of graphs? I'm sure they don't mean bar charts.

It didn't even dawn on me that that figure was supposed to represent graphs until I read your comment (and then the caption), I had just assumed it was supposed to represent Big Data.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#65

Post by tkahnoski »

akiselev wrote: post #54
exelius wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way; this is the kind of thing that can become a state-secret level advantage. Seriously, it's a graph processor. Graph analysis is basically the entire job of a modern intelligence agency. There's a cold-war level arms race going on in cybersecurity. Russia embarrassed us with their sophisticated cyberwarfare capability in the last election -- they were able to infiltrate both campaigns AND the FBI (they used fal…

> they used false information to manipulate Comey into making a statement -- which required them to know how conflicted he was over interference in the Clinton e-mail thing Sidenote: Comey strongly implied (damn near said it really) in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday that this did not actually happen and the news articles were way off. Makes you wonder what did actually happen.

I think the comment is referring to this story: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/james-comey-fbi-inves...

I missed this exchange in the livestream, relevant bit: "BURR: Were there other things that contributed to that that you can describe in an open session?

COMEY: There were other things that contributed to that. One significant item I can’t, I know the committee’s been briefed on. There’s been some public accounts of it, which are nonsense, but I understand the committee’s been briefed on the classified facts."

We obviously don't know what the classified facts are. This also seems to be in reference to the announcements in late summer vs the disclosure right before the election which I haven't found anything in the transcript about.

Full Transcript: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/08/us/politics/senate-hearin... (Aside: linking to NY times because it was slightly less ad heavy than other sites I could find. Couldn't find a single one without auto-play video...)

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#66

Post by droopyEyelids »

qntty wrote: post #38
empath75 wrote: post #12

Is it just me or is the illustration of 'graphs' of totally the wrong kind of graphs? I'm sure they don't mean bar charts.

Yeah, a bit embarrassing for a magazine that covers technology, HIVE defintely works on graph-theory graphs. Even weirder is the (Source: DARPA) attribution.

Also they say the processor will use "1000 times less energy". Incredibly confused thinking goes into writing a sentence like that.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#67

Post by chrisallenlane »

exelius wrote: post #48
bantunes wrote: post #14

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

No way; this is the kind of thing that can become a state-secret level advantage. Seriously, it's a graph processor. Graph analysis is basically the entire job of a modern intelligence agency. There's a cold-war level arms race going on in cybersecurity. Russia embarrassed us with their sophisticated cyberwarfare capability in the last election -- they were able to infiltrate both campaigns AND the FBI (they used fal…

> Russia embarrassed us with their sophisticated cyberwarfare capability in the last election

I'm still unclear how "sophisticated" these attacks were. Per the unclassified information, all I've heard mentioned is:

1. social media manipulation

2. traditional media manipulation (RT)

3. email spearphishing

None of the above strikes me as particularly sophisticated, even if it's potentially effective. (I don't know if it was effective or not in the case of the election.)

Of course, I have no idea what the classified information says regarding any of this.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#69

Post by nickpsecurity »

losteric wrote: post #61
bantunes wrote: post #14

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

Versus, what? No public funding? No private utilization of public research? Public research should fall in the public domain, free of IP and open for any use. If anything, we should be doing more of this... create dedicated academic R&D funding streams by taxing established or dying industries in order to publicly explore new fields, and use X Prize-style programs or NASA's COTS/CRS programs to incentivize private co…

"Versus, what? No public funding? No private utilization of public research?"

Versus the taxpayer-funded I.P. being licensed to all parties in the country that funded it with the big corporations being forced to compete on better implementations delivered faster to customers. Big players can try to make billions, small players can innovate on top of same I.P. without a lawsuit, and individuals can even attempt to homebrew their own without a lawsuit.

Re: Darpa Funds Development of New Type of Processor

#70

Post by hinkley »

bantunes wrote: post #14

Can't wait for this publicly funded research to make some private corporation billions!

Like web browsers?

Mars Andreesen started off working on an NSF grant at NCSA. One of those things Al Gore encouraged (when people misquote him as inventing the internet)

Edit: also why web browsers are free. Netscape had to compete with a free browser.

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