Reservoir Labs has been awarded a research contract with negotiated options up to $8.7M in DARPA's Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technology (PERFECT) program. Reservoir's goal in the PERFECT program is to help develop computer architectures that improve the power efficiency of embedded computing devices from today's 1 GFLOPS/W to a future 75 GFLOPS/W.
This capability is needed for current and next generation military systems such as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR).
Current computer architectures cannot meet the rapidly growing demands of ISR systems within the power, heat dissipation, and weight constraints of military platforms, and this gap is predicted to increase.
This is because traditional Moore's Law scaling no longer can increase the performance of computers while maintaining the same power.
As DARPA's PERFECT program scales performance with new computing architectures, new programming tools and new algorithms will be required.
Reservoir's contribution to the program will be to advance the state of the art in programming tools for these new power efficient architectures. Reservoir will be leveraging its advanced R-Stream optimization software for the effort.
R-Stream uses operations research techniques and advanced polyhedral mathematics to generate efficient choreographies of computation over parallel computing hardware to avoid power-burning communications.
Reservoir will be using R-Stream to target the new near-threshold computing processor architectures being developed in the PERFECT program and new algorithms for next generation ISR systems.
Richard A. Lethin, Ph.D., president of Reservoir Labs, said, "It is a great privilege to have been selected by DARPA for this research program. Our team is looking forward to the challenges presented by these new low power architectures and the opportunity to contribute to US security.
"Furthermore, the technologies from the PERFECT program will have broad impact saving energy and enabling new capabilities for commercial and consumer devices as they rapidly adopt these innovations."
