Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Data Centers
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Little’s Law in the Exascale Era
Performance, delay and parallelism at large scale: Little’s Law speaks to all of these issues and more. When performance optimization, reliability requirements, and energy management are convolved, the constraint-based optimization problems become dauntingly complex.
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Research {preposition} Infrastructure
Computing research and advanced computing infrastructure are interdependent, yet profoundly different in culture and metrics. As the scale and scope of computing grows, each needs to understand the constraints and needs of the other.
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It Is Fall: There Must Be Clouds
Today, I testified to the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Space, Science and Technology. The topic of the hearing was “The Next IT Revolution?: Cloud Computing Opportunities and Challenges.” This is an exciting time, when computing can be a great equalizer, providing access to the world’s knowledge…
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Battling Evil: Dark Silicon
Dark silicon, the very phrase sounds ominious and it is, for I believe it will profoundly reshape how we think about computing in the next decade. We soon will have (and in many cases already do have) chips with more transistors than can be concurrently activated. The practical implication is that most of the chip…
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Goldilocks, Porridge and Science: Getting It Right
It is now incumbent upon us to rethink how we facilitate discovery and innovation in this brave new world of large data, for practitioners of both small and large science. Simply put, we must reconsider how we fund, construct, manage and operate scientific data repositories.
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It’s the Sum, Not the Parts
Computer architects create something of functional beauty, just as do their cousins who work in the more tangible media of rock and stone. Consider John Cocke and the IBM 801, Ken Batcher and the Goodyear MPP, Tadashi Watanabe and the NEC SX. Similarly, Seymour Cray’s designs balanced many aspects of power engineering, packaging and cooling,…