DARPA Chief Outlines Array of Future Projects

coondoggie writes to tell us that DARPA announced a wide array of new projects in a report to the House Armed Services Committee that they will be funding in the near future. "everything from advanced network and communications implementations to powerful laser and unmanned aircraft development as well as developing techniques to help military personnel survive myriad dangerous situations"

Re:keep proper time

[gardyloo]

All of this technology will require an atomic clock to keep proper time.

Erm... why?

Not sure why.

[jd]

You could move to asychronous processors and eliminate the need to worry about timings issues. Or you could have RAM that worked faster than the CPU cores and interleave the cores. Or you could map 1000 virtual cores onto Nx1000 physical processing elements, and have the hypervisor schedule the vcores such that the I/O bandwidth was always optimal. Or each core could be given so much local L1/L2 that main memory accesses were infrequent enough for conflicts to not arise. Or you could provide each core with local "main memory", a-la the Transputer. There are probably hundreds more solutions to this problem. When the number of ways to implement a system outnumber the number of systems likely to be sold (at least within the next 20 years, anyway), I don't think there'll be a desperate craving for one specific technology.

I'm much more concerned with the fact that chip companies go for what can be made quickly and sold fast, whether or not it's any good. (Hence Intel rushing Itanium into production before it actually worked, Sun adding floating-point very late into the *Sparcs, why multicores never got beyond 4x4s even though single-core processors can go 16-way, why GPUs were so late in the game even though offloading had been mastered decades earlier, why multithreading and deep-pipelining processors were abandoned by Intel, and so on.)

If companies could afford the delay to get things technologically right and then to price them low enough for the market to handle, we'd have seen Moore's Law abandoned by now... for being too conservative. Of course, this isn't realistic. Companies do not have infinite money for research, development, testing and high discounts. And because it's not realistic, it is inevitable that short-cuts will be taken that produce flawed, sub-optimal products, whether or not it's obvious that such products are unnecessary and a distraction.

Re:One of eight

[call-me-kenneth]

Don't you think it's interesting that for four years, the US and UK military forces in the Iraq sustained a pretty stready rate of casualties whilst the country slowly unraveled around them and a de-facto civil war / ethnic cleansing / religious genocide killed thousands of people, despite all the UAVs, ECM to jam EIDs, superstrong ballistic armour on people and vehicles, digital data and comms that have all contributed to the > $1T cost. Then in the last year or so things have quietened down considerably, due to a combination of layer-8 events - more US boots on the ground, the Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda (Iraq), Muqtada al-Sadr's ceasefire and alleged withdrawal into Iran, tighter border controls in Saudi and Syria reducing the flood of eager young Jihadists, and so on and on. (Of course it can and very likely will go tango uniform again at some point in the next five years, but we'll see.) Anyway, the point is that the gadgets can certainly help win the high-intensity phase of such a conflict, but they don't help with hearts & minds.

Re:One of eight

[samkass]

Winning the hearts and minds is completely orthogonal to the technology. Technology won't rescue you from awful strategies or misguided goals. But it still helps save lives, and I'm sure there are a lot of soldiers out there who are glad to be alive and owe it to some of the technology that's come out of DARPA.

Re:For a nerdy, tech-loving toy freak...

[Alwin Henseler]

Like any true geek, I've often admired boy toys coming out of defense research projects (regardless of which country or organization produced them), for the technical feat or wow-factor. BUT...

At the same time it saddens me to know that so much effort is channeled into (in a sense, wasted) destroying other human beings. A stealth bomber is a magnificent machine, but it's basically a machine meant to go somewhere, destroy things and/or people, and get away undetected. In history there may be times when it seems necessary to do that (or show the capability), but imagine all the good things that could have been done if the budget for its development had been spent elsewhere (like in medical research).

Mankind has developed weapons that fit into a truck, and can kill 100.000 humans in minutes, but at the same time a significant portion of people on this planet doesn't have enough/clean drinking water, even though 2/3 of our planet is covered with water (and it's easy to separate water and salt). We do have a bomb that you can fire with a gun from miles away, and that will steer itself in mid-air using satellite-provided timing signals, to destroy a target much more accurately than before. Yet we still don't have a cheap way to produce solar cells, even though the basic compound is among the most common materials on the planet.

I have no doubt that if you would take any large country's defense budget and spend it on third world economic/technological development, cancer, malaria research or similar, much more human suffering would be prevented than the few terrorists stopped or soldiers saved in wars on foreign soil. Can mankind do it? It looks like not, which is sad knowing that we've wandered around this planet for many thousands of years.

This is probably the #1 reason I would never work on anything high tech, if it has *primarily* a military purpose. In that context, I'd consider sitting around, doing nothing and eating out of my nose a more productive way to spend my time.

Re:keep proper time

[vertinox]

Erm... why?

First thing that comes to mind is unbreakable encryption with a one-time pad [wikipedia.org].

If your devices were never off even by one second, then you could always know what time the other device is set to at all times.

Example... You're in the field and you need to use your laptop to communicate to another officers laptop while still possibly being eavesdropped by the enemy. Each laptop contains the same one time pad for a particular situation that expires after a certain amount of time (FFS you shouldn't be holding strategic level OTP encryption in something that could be captured) that you had received prior to deployment.

Now since both laptops have atomic clocks they could use that as the reference point of which pad to be using at a given moment. Of course the TCP/IP packets will have to time stamp a bit retroactively because of the slight lag delay in transfer of data, but that shouldn't be a problem due to each laptop knowing exactly what the other devices time and hence which one pad it at what time.

Now the OTPs might be rather large depending on the deployment time (like a 1gb text file), but as far as most people can tell the man in the middle attack is impossible to break a OTP as long as no one reuses any of the previous transmissions.