How should we think of this? As a system in which processors can be switched almost instantaneously to different operating systems or applications?
It is not just about the processor. How do you adapt the cache structure? How do you adapt and reconfigure what is going on in the chip to meet the dynamic requirements of the application? It is a bunch of different things that the teams are going to have to look at and come to some conclusion over the next year or so on about what the right approach is.
Ultimately, what sort of problems will this solve?
It is also about reducing the time it takes to come up with (applications). PERCS will include pretty sophisticated compilers and middleware that will be supported by some of the hardware features to automate many phases of the program development process.
The P in HPCS -- the P is for productivity, not performance. (HPCS stands for High Productivity Computing Systems and is part of a $146m project created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop new supercomputer architectures by 2010.) So our goal here is to have a computer that is able to adapt itself to different kinds of application requirements.
I just want to emphasise that the next phase is an investigation phase. We will be developing these technologies and be able to talk more intelligently about what impact this is going to have. There is an overall blueprint, but there is a lot of investigation still to be done to see how close we can come to that goal. There are some fundamental problems that will have to be addressed.
Are there any major scientific problems you would like to see solved with your systems? We've cracked the genetic code, the origin of the big bang. What's the next big problem?
I've had a long history in this area, and one of the reasons is that is that there is such a great potential to make advances. This might sound a little cliche, but we can and are having this kind of impact. Weather forecasting is one of them. I am deeply interested in life sciences. The Blue Gene program started out as a way to solve a grand challenge, protein folding. We are also trying to solve problems for the nuclear stewardship programme so that we can validate the safety of our nuclear stockpile without having to test the weapons.
