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Singluar computing have built a chip based on this tech, and deployed in a military UAV. It enabled tracking of objects(which ws impossible before due to power

by hershel 13y ago

Singluar computing have built a chip based on this tech, and deployed in a military UAV. It enabled tracking of objects(which ws impossible before due to power constraints), at 6400x the performance/power of other best known methods. http://www.defensetechbriefs.com/component/content/article/17021 http://www.defensetechbriefs.com/component/content/article/1... http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1693583 http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?ar... From the paper: "The hardware is designed to perform high dynamic range arithmetic with roughly 1% error per operation. Singular has developed and studied varied algorithms for producing high quality results despite the approximate hardware. These studies use a perfect simulation of the accelerator’s arithmetic. Tasks that have been explored include summing thousands of numbers without accumulating error, k-nearest neighbor classification (KNN), foreground/background separation using Gaussian mixture models, iterative reconstruction tomography, deblurring using the Richardson-Lucy deconvolution algorithm, FFTs, radar processing, neural net learning, and other tasks. Most of these algorithms need slight adaptations to prevent cumulative effects of the 1% error, but with those adaptations all perform as desired."

samstave 13y ago
And these are precisely the things, which we know little, that the NSA may be exploiting with extreme effectiveness that scares the shit out of me. I recall an article from 2005 that described a system that could track BULLETS IN MID FLIGHT over a vast swath, in-the DARK, which provided detailed view in all ballistics in a fighting theater....
- m_darkTemplar 13y ago
  It's probably not of much use to the NSA where breaking encryption requires precise math that will fail quickly if operations are off by 1%.
  - sophacles 13y ago
    I can however see lots of application in various pattern analysis techniques based on machine learning. There's lots of places in those that a bit of fuzz won't really matter, at least for first pass filtering. Similarly voice recognition would probably have to deal with far larger errors from the transmission and capture of sound anyway. Just because it's not good for decryption, doesn't mean it isn't good for the overall set of NSA operations.
    - klipt 13y ago
      Yeah, even human brains can do voice recognition, and they're noisy as fuck.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    For floating point operations sure, but if I understand it correctly it could also provide a speed advantage to other operations. It means 1% of the operations will be wrong, but what does that matter when it allows you to search 10,000 more keys. Perhaps you could get even more speed up with specialized hardware for decryption, and then buy rooms full of them.

by hershel 13y ago

samstave 13y ago

And these are precisely the things, which we know little, that the NSA may be exploiting with extreme effectiveness that scares the shit out of me. I recall an article from 2005 that described a system that could track BULLETS IN MID FLIGHT over a vast swath, in-the DARK, which provided detailed view in all ballistics in a fighting theater....

m_darkTemplar 13y ago
It's probably not of much use to the NSA where breaking encryption requires precise math that will fail quickly if operations are off by 1%.
- sophacles 13y ago
  I can however see lots of application in various pattern analysis techniques based on machine learning. There's lots of places in those that a bit of fuzz won't really matter, at least for first pass filtering. Similarly voice recognition would probably have to deal with far larger errors from the transmission and capture of sound anyway. Just because it's not good for decryption, doesn't mean it isn't good for the overall set of NSA operations.
  - klipt 13y ago
    Yeah, even human brains can do voice recognition, and they're noisy as fuck.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  For floating point operations sure, but if I understand it correctly it could also provide a speed advantage to other operations. It means 1% of the operations will be wrong, but what does that matter when it allows you to search 10,000 more keys. Perhaps you could get even more speed up with specialized hardware for decryption, and then buy rooms full of them.