Not necessarily easy to program.
It just cannot require explicit knowledge of the system architecture in order to program, like the old mainframes did.
Of course, there is something to be said for explicitly managed systems. A mainframe with 512kbytes of memory ran the air defense of the United States from the 1970s until 2004 (well, three of them). Why wasn't it replaced earlier? Because they tried to, four times, with general purpose computers but, until 2004 (and a dozen-or-so Opterons), they couldn't handle the load.

But the military no longer trains many programmers. And hiring Contractors (or G.S.'s) to program for explicitly managed systems is very, very expensive.

Also, I think they want a total power of 50GFLOPS/W, including the power used for cooling.
If I was planning to put this rack in a tank or a ship, that's how I would write the spec.

Since when has DARPA been conventional?

Course, I seem to remember reading about an artificial diamond company which was planning on scaling up to make diamond semiconductor wafers. No idea what how different diamond lithography would be to Silicon, but it would at least have a much larger thermal envelope, allowing higher processor loading, all else being equal. . .

Semi-conventional perhaps?

At high frequency ranges, the separation between wires begins to act as a capacitor, resulting in signals jumping between contacts. Unless you are planning on using waveguides.
As Intel discovered in the P4 generations, upping the clock frequencies is an impractical, low FLOPS/W solution.
And, using your math, the yield is only 10MFLOPS/W, versus the stated goal of 50GFLOPS/W.
I think the researchers would be better off going the Centrino/Core Duo Route.

NSA is not part of the Defense Department.
Doesn't mean they won't reap the benefits of this DARPA project, but it's unlikely that they are making it for them.

I can think of a heck of a lot of things that the DoD could use this tech for: reading your PgP emails isn't one of them.
Reading Ahmadinejad's, Kim's, or BinLaden's on the other hand would be very useful.

But just off the top of my head, what could we use such a powerful, compact computer for? Hmmmm. . .
*Server consolidation for field command-control centers
*Tactical and targeting computers for various vehicles (Tanks, aircraft, etc)
*Control systems for lighter, more mobile Ballistic Missile Defense systems (The present ones are mounted on converted Oil Derricks - Be nice to mount one on, say, a truck. Or a Destroyer.)

I could probably think of half-a-dozen more if I wasn't pulling a 36-hour-plus day right now in an attempt to get my sleep schedule back on track after two weeks of midshift.
But since I can't, I'll leave that as an exercise for you.

Just remember: The US Military does not normally operate domestically, and is forbidden to take action against US Citizens unless actually under combat conditions without Presidential Authorization, which is only given on a case-by-case basis.
If the boys in the Pentagon Basement are asking Obama if they can read your email, You are doing some seriously BAD shit.

Well, I guess a form of compact cooling would also be part of the project.
Or, more likely, part of another DARPA project that has been underway for awhile.
After all, don't you think that soldiers in full Chem-Warefare gear in the desert (be it Nevada, Iraq, or any other) would perform better if they weren't just about to fall over from the heat?
I do. And if it can cool a Soldier's Uniform, many of them could no doubt cool a server.

Contrary to your apparent view, the vast majority of the individuals in the US Government do love freedom and wish to protect it.
The defense department tends to be the place that these people are most concentrated: the same Defense Department that DARPA serves.

I doubt that ANYONE in the government does not Love and wish to protect Freedom:
There are those, however, who may undermine it unintentionally due to a lack of understanding of what their "payment to supports," will actually cause in the long run.
This is called "Being naive".
With luck, it can be corrected.
With time, any damage can be reversed, as long as those who understand what has happened and do truly Love Freedom persevere.

Complaining and Blaming others accomplishes little.

Teach me to post without previewing.
d'oh! *facepalm*

If they thought it would happen this year, DARPA wouldn't be interested.

Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency

These are the guys who fund the crazy stuff, like robotic exoskeletons (Starship Troopers), Electronic Telepathy (via radio/net), and more.
NOTHING they fund is expected to bear fruit quickly, but when it does bear fruit, that fruit is like gold (case in point, a little thing once called ARPANET.

No, as it is a different abbreviation.
FLoating point Operations Per Second
FLoating point OPerations
Neither are really good acronyms, (That would be FPOPS and FPO), but they are the accepted terms.

HOWEVER: It is all nitpicky geek-out, I'm-better-than-you, You're-So-Dumb-You-forgot-the-"S". B.S.
Please.
This is Slashdot, not middle school.
hard to tell some times, I know.

If you want an in-depth discussion of the problems of the US Health-care system and the causes of it, look me up in a thread on that topic.
Shouldn't hijack this thread so high in the nest.

I'll just leave by saying the source of the problems with the US health care system, and the reason that 90% of the population is vastly over-insured while still in danger of Bankruptcy due to a lack of "catastrophic" coverage is due to. . .
*ominous music*
The Byzantine US Tax Code.

Enough off topic. If you want more, get a /. story on it started, or do some research.
:)

We are a species of sapient monkey. True.
But do our descendants have to be?
The further we go, the larger the Human diaspora, the more likely that a local cosmological event will NOT kill all of humanity.
Right now we are gone if the Earth get's hit by a big chunk of ice from the Oort Cloud, or a wayward NEO.
Get 500 breeding-age humans off this rock, and we are unlikely to go extinct without a major Solar event (far less likely).
Send out the slow-boats and you've increased our chances immeasurably, down to the chances of a star in the immediate neighborhood going Nova.
Perfect the Alcubierre Warp Drive, and the chances of Human extinction begin to approach Zero.

Well, Until such time as man has evolved so far as to no longer be classified as a sapient monkey.

The primary reason to go to the moon?
Spaceport for the Belt
Transshipment in and out of the Earths Gravity Well is immensely expensive, compared to the same on the moon, and it can be used as a construction platform more easily than null-g.
The Belt is where the real prize lies though.
Five time the entire Earth's Mining Output of Iron (as well as many times that amount of rarer metals like iridium) in a single nickel-iron asteroid. And it could be mined in a matter of weeks or months with a parabolic mirror and some rockets for spin.
That's where the money is, and where there is money, there will be people.
If we can get the Bureaucrats out of the way.

Science? Science is a good beni. But more, useful science is done in the closed labs of major corporations than in government-funded research. You would be amazed at how much (U.S.)Government grant money is spent on such things as determining how the cleanlyness habits of Chinese Hookers affects STD spread, instead of things like High-energy physics and deep-space telescopes.
IBM has made more discoveries in quantum physics than Los Alamos.
Because IBM makes a profit on them.
Let's hope that Virgin Galactic does the same to NASA.

You want Firefly? First you need FireNASA.

http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_nafa.shtml

NASA should be a regulatory agency, just like the FAA. But when you give regulation to a "competitor-in-the-field," amazingly, no-one else meets the regulatory requirements to compete.
(offtopic/ Think of that when they talk about a "public insurance plan" too. \offtopic)

Poor Author C. I wish he had lived to see his 2001 visions come to life. . .

I presently work in an Air Operations Center responsible for both military operations, disaster recovery, and search and rescue in the continental United States. This system is integral to the search and rescue portion of that mission; specifically, it is used to track civilian transponders such as those used on civilian aircraft, watercraft, and as rented by many national parks to hikers.

You can't get more clean and air conditioned than the server room(s) which this system sits in, nor an operations floor that the clients which connect to it sit in.

And Yet: We are lucky to get a single 9 out of the thing.

You ever here the saying that if you put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand typewriters for a thousand years you will get the collected works of Shakespeare eventually? Well, the common joke among us is that this system, was 5 monkeys on emacs terminals for about 5 minutes. It's that bad.

and I know that almost no-one will read this, a week after the story was posted, c'est la vie