Accelerated Computation for Efficient Scientific Simulation (ACCESS)

The Defense Sciences Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting research proposals in technologies for the acceleration of scientific simulations of physical systems characterized by coupled partial differential equations (PDEs). The Accelerated Computation for Efficient Scientific Simulation (ACCESS) Program seeks innovative ideas for computational architectures that will achieve the equivalent of petaflops performance in a benchtop form-factor and be capable of what traditional architectures would define as “strong” scaling for predictive scientific simulations of interest. DARPA expects achieving these goals will require the parallel development of non-traditional component technologies exploiting novel hybrid analog/digital techniques, algorithms, instruction sets, controllers, and the integration and optimization of these components within prototype systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.