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Although we're only six to eight years away from the first exaflops systems, the DOE's primary exascale program has yet to be funded. (And since this is an election year in the US, such funding will probably not fall into place until 2013.) In the interim, FastForward was devised in order to begin the needed R&D for some of the exascale foundational technologies, in particular, processors, memory and storage.

At least some of the impetus for the program came from the vendors themselves. According to Mark Seager, Intel's CTO for the company's High Performance Computing Ecosystem group, the DOE was told by multiple commercial partners that research for the component pieces needed to get underway this year if they hoped to field an exascale machine by 2020. That led to the formation of the program, and apparently there was enough loose change rolling around at the Office of Science and NNSA to fund this more modest effort.

Although all the FastForward subcontracts have yet to be made public, as of today there are four known awards:

* Intel: $19 million for both processor and memory technologies
* AMD: $12.6 million for processor and memory technologies
* NVIDIA: $12 million for processor technology
* Whamcloud (along with EMC, Cray and HDF Group): Unknown dollar amount for storage and I/O technologies

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DARPA is seeking to make a lightweight, conformal under-suit that is transparent to the user (like a diver’s wetsuit). The suit seeks to employ a system (or web) of closed-loop controlled actuation, transmission, and functional structures that protect injury prone areas, focusing on the soft tissues that connect and interface with the skeletal system. Other novel technologies that prevent, reduce, ambulate, and assist with healing of acute and chronic musculoskeletal injuries are also being sought.

In 2013, this "Warrior Web" project has $10.25 million in funding.

We first covered this in September of 2011 and noted how this would be a supersuit like what Edna Mode provided for the Incredibles in the Pixar animation.

In addition to direct injury mitigation, Warrior Web will have the capacity to augment positive work done by the muscles, to reduce the physical burden, by leveraging the web structure to impart joint torque at the ankle, knee, and hip joints. The suit seeks to reduce the metabolic cost of carrying a typical assault load, as well as compensate for the weight of the suit itself, while consuming no more than 100 Watts of electric power from the battery source.

While injury mitigation is a primary goal, a Warrior Web suit system is not intended to interfere with current warfighter “soldier systems,” such as external body armor, rather it aims to augment them to improve warfighter effectiveness.

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1. DearAstronomer -Nearly a year ago, the Pluto-Charon Dwarf Planet system made headlines with the announcement that a fourth moon had been detected. Today, Alan Stern (SWRI) has announced via twitter ( @alanstern ) that a fifth moon has been detected in orbit around Pluto.

2. Supernova Condensate - So, with a newly discovered moon, exactly how large is Pluto's family anyway?


This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows five moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle marks the newly discovered moon, designated P5, as photographed by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on July 7. The observations will help scientists in their planning for the July 2015 flyby of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. P4 was uncovered in Hubble imagery in 2011. (Credit: NASA; ESA; M. Showalter, SETI Institute)

3. Nextbigfuture - A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of a fifth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system.

New Horizon spacecraft, launched in 2006, will fly by Pluto in July, 2015



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