Even as Moore's Law nears an end
H
igh-Performance Comput-
ing (HPC) has become in-
creasingly crucial in many
parts of the defence manu-
facturing sector, enabling
complex data analysis, simulating intricate
processes, and optimizing modelling and
testing. For example, modelling aerody-
namics in aircraft wing design, or innovat-
ing with materials in ballistics. While pow-
erful, HPC faces several challenges as it
responds to exponential demands for com-
putational power. With the gradual lapsing
of Moore's Law, Owen Thomas, founder
of Red Oak Consulting, argues that the de-
fence sector will continue to thrive as HPC
invariably moves to the cloud.
Moore's Law, formulated by Gordon
Moore in 1965, predicted that the num-
ber of transistors placed on a single square
inch of an integrated circuit chip would
double every two years, leading to expo-
nential increases in computing power. It
has had profound implications for the de-
velopment of HPC, not least for defence,
and the evolution of cloud computing
more generally, reshaping the landscape
of modern technology.
It is now well recognised that Moore's
Law is nearing its end as the ability to
compress processing power onto ever
smaller chips reaches its limit. There has
been about a trillion-fold increase in com-
puting power used in predictive models.
To improve these high-performance mod-
els further, we need ever greater comput-
ing power. But, with increasing costs and
shrinking space available for the growing
number of semiconductor chips involved
in HPC compute, all sectors, including
the military as it tackles challenges on
land, sea and in the air, face a new di-
lemma.
HPC in practice in the defence
sector
It's true that HPC, often aligned with AI
and machine to machine (M2M) com-
munications, has found its way onto the
battlefield with ruggedized platforms
processing petabytes of data from satellite
or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for
geospatial intelligence and mapping large
areas. Likewise, computer on module
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