The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Northrop Grumman to collaborate on the development of a graph processor chip that aims to enhance efficiencies and capabilities of today’s top processors.

As a part of DARPA’s Hierarchical Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) programme, Northrop Grumman will work with five other entities to execute and evaluate real-time performance of various graph algorithms in a newly developed HIVE chip.

HIVE seeks to create and integrate technologies that will lead to the development of a generic graph processor, responsible for quickly analysing large data sets to determine correlations and dependencies that were unable to be discovered before.

Northrop Grumman will assess the possibility for graph analytics to resolve Department of Defense (DoD) processing challenges while also understanding how the analytics are currently used in DoD systems.

The problem facing today’s top processors is that there are currently few programming models and generalized processor architectures that can effectively support the irregular memory accesses and fine grained concurrency requirements of static and dynamic/streaming graph analytics, while also providing accelerated run-time support. The ability to quickly identify commonalities, patterns and dependencies in order to predict outcomes is vital due to the high volume and variety of data being generated every day.

Northrop Grumman will identify and develop static and streaming graph analytics to solve five types of problem areas including: anomaly detection, domain specific search, dependency mapping, N-x contingency analysis and causal modelling of events.

This programme will look to identify new uses for graph analytics that have not been included in previous research due to processing, power or size constraints.