The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that it has selected five participants for its Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) program to develop a high-performance data handling platform. Intel and Qualcomm will be among the five participants that will help the agency build the new graph analytics platform.
“The HIVE program is an exemplary prototype for how to engage the U.S. commercial industry, leverage their design expertise, and enhance U.S. competitiveness, while also enhancing national security,” saidWilliam Chappell, director of MTO, in the release announcing the selections. “By forming a team with members in both the commercial and defense sectors, we hope to forge new R&D pathways that can deliver unprecedented levels of hardware specialization,” he added.
A main objective of the HIVE program is to create a graph analytics processor, which can more efficiently find and represent links between data elements and categories. These could include person-to-person interactions, and disparate links such as geography, change in doctor visit trends, or social media and regional strife.
Unlike traditional analytic tools that study one-to-one or one-to-many relationships, graph analytics can use algorithms to process and interpret data in “many to many” relationships. An example of this would be all the Amazon users and all the products they’ve bought on the site.
In combination with other machine learning techniques that can categorize raw data elements and update the elements as new data arrives, the graph processors should be able to discern hidden causal relationships among the data elements.
DARPA believes that such a graph processor could achieve a “thousandfold improvement in processing efficiency,” over today’s best processors. That should enable the real-time identification of strategically important relationships as they unfold in the field, rather than after-the-fact in data centers.
“By mid-2021, the goal of HIVE is to provide a 16-node demonstration platform showcasing 1,000x performance-per-watt improvement over today’s best-in-class hardware and software for graph analytics workloads,” said Dhiraj Mallick, vice president of the Data Center Group and general manager of the Innovation Pathfinding and Architecture Group at Intel.“Intel’s interest and focus in the area may lead to earlier commercial products featuring components of this pathfinding technology much sooner,” he noted.