AFOSR Seeking “Transformational Computing”

CCC Blog (04/12/12) Erwin Gianchandani

The U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has launched a basic research initiative that aims to bring together the computational hardware, software, aerospace sciences, physics, and applied mathematics communities to create a novel and unique capability to design high-performance computing platforms to facilitate the development of Air Force systems.  The initiative aims to resolve the issues of increased power consumption and the slowing of Moore’s law.  “There is a clear need for a fundamental basic research program wherein the hardware and algorithms are placed on an equal footing to develop specialized, heterogeneous, and very high-performance systems to answer the computational objectives of the Air Force and the Department of Defense,” AFOSR’s announcement says.  The goal is to develop the fundamental research to enable highly focused, potentially heterogeneous computational platforms that offer orders of magnitude better performance for single application areas.  “This effort will be focused on fundamental and interdisciplinary research in computational hardware, computational software, and mathematical models, and is especially interested in work that characterizes the relationship between hardware and algorithms,” the announcement says.

–MORE–