Game over, security researchers – DARPA’s AI bug hunters are coming for your jobs A quest to build a smart computer system that finds and patches bugs faster and more efficiently than humans is off to a good start with all the teams in DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge performing very well indeed. The contest, held at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, was organised by the research arm of the US …
Each team was equipped with a server containing 128 Intel Xeon processors running at 2.5 GhZ and boasting over a thousand processing cores, 16TB of RAM and a liquid cooling system that required 250 gallons of water per minute to cool the big iron.
I call bullshit.
250 US gallons per minute is 15.8 liters per second, which at near-ambient temperature is also about 15.8 kg/s. Water heat capacity is about 4.2 kJ/kg-K. Assuming that the outflow of the heat exchanger is about 20 degrees warmer than the inflow, we end up with approximately 1.3 MW of thermal power, or more than 10 KW per processor.
I know Intel CPUs are not very power efficient - but this is more than an order of magnitude too high, even including all the possible system gubbins.
Thumbsup for this quick back of the morning coffee napkin computation.
Maybe DARPA secretly deployed its first 1dm³ nanocomputer developing tremendous entropyheat as it computes at peta-LIPS speed under the hood of a large array of rather pedestrian Intel-brand Intel processors?
Thumbsup for this exercise in bug-finding. I'm looking forward to some papers in IEEE Software / IEEE Computer / IEEE Intelligent Systems.
I think the water flow number was for the whole set of fourteen(?) servers on the air-gapped side of the competition. 100kW per processor still seems high tho'. Maybe they are including all the systems outside the air-gap too. They had pretty cool visualizations generated from the data the ref computers burned onto CDs for each round, then shipped across the air-gap for reading and analysis. There's a DARPA video about the 3-day build for the set up here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaSpX-ITxUE
I think that, at 20°C, your temperature change across the HX is way too high. More likely to be about 2°C; which makes it about 1kW per processor. Which does still sound high as TDP for a Xeon is around 100 W; but I guess there is other stuff to cool too.
I'm wondering if perhaps the 250 gpm is for the entire bank of seven of these monsters. That at least brings it down to a proper order of magnitude. And if it's a capacity of 250, not a flow rate of 250, it seems almost reasonable. (Also remember that almost everyone exaggerates the size of their pipe.)
“This may be the end of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge but it’s just the beginning of a revolution in software security .. That is a huge advance compared to where the cyber defense world was yesterday.” link
I would have thought the Cyber Grand Challenge manifestly demonstrated the current crisis in software security. Trying to detect exploitable bugs in a live networked system is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
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