US intel agency working on a supercomputer, set to make quintillion calculations per second

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is funding a  multi-year research project that could fundamentally change the field of supercomputing.

International Business Machines Corp, Raytheon BBN Technologies and Northrop Grumman Corp won the contracts, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said Wednesday, without disclosing financial details.

The multiyear research may also make the U.S. government the frontrunner over China, Russia, the European Union and Japan in the global race to build a computer capable of breaking the famed exaflop barrier - capable of a quintillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second.

IARPA said in a statement that the energy demands of today's high-performance computers have become a critical challenge for the Intelligence Community that the C3 program aims to address.

"The power, space and cooling requirements for current supercomputers based on complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology are becoming unmanageable," Marc Manheimer, C3 program manager at IARPA, said in a statement. "Computers based on superconducting logic integrated with new kinds of cryogenic memory will allow expansion of current computing facilities while staying within space and energy budgets, and may enable supercomputer development beyond the exascale."  

The C3 program is expected to be a five-year, two-phase endeavor. Phase one will occur in the first three years and will consist of developing or demonstrating a small superconducting processor. Phase two will follow over the final two years and will involve the integration of the new technologies into a small-scale working superconducting computer model.

"Superconducting computing research currently consists of a few, scattered efforts with no initiative focused on advancing the field overall. Major research challenges include insufficient memory, insufficient integration density, and no realization of complete computing systems. The C3 Program will address these challenges with the goal of establishing superconducting computing as a long-term solution to the power- cooling problem and a successor to end-of-roadmap CMOS for high performance computing. Success of C3 will pave the way to a new generation of superconducting computers that are far more energy efficient than end-of-roadmap CMOS and scalable to practical application," IARPA stated.

Key components of the C3 project are cryogenic memory for greatly improved energy efficiency and data capacity and advanced superconducting circuits integrated with memory and other components in a superconducting computer in order to assess performance metrics.