Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Multicore Architecture
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Escaping from Flatland
As a community, we have grudgingly and guardedly recognized the need for multicore processors. However, we are still clinging tenaciously to our dual in-line memory module (DIMM), two-dimensional packaging and double data rate (DDR) memory designs. We need a visitor from the third dimension, preaching the gospel of chip stacking to the denizens of chip…
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When Petascale Is Just Too Slow
Evolution or revolution, it’s the persistent question. Can we build reliable exascale systems from extrapolations of current technology or will new approaches be required? There is no definitive answer, as almost any approach might be made to work at some level with enough heroic effort. The bigger question is what design would enable the most…
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Three Views on Multicore
Andrew Chien, Dave Patterson and I have each written articles on the challenges and opportunities inherent in multicore hardware and software for the Community Computing Consortium (CCC) blog. My recent article, on the challenge of software, is now posted. In the article, I argued that we must re-envision parallel computing and a new generation of…
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ManyCore: Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba
As I write this, I am attending the ETH LASER summer school on concurrency, which is being held on the island of Elba. As I prepare to deliver six lectures on multicore and cloud computing, the geographic irony of grand ambition, hubris and ignominious defeat is not lost on me. We have been struggling for…
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Showing Up and Two Corollaries
“Eighty to ninety percent of life is showing up.” The line has been variously attributed to Yogi Berra, Woody Allen or even an anonymous wag. At the recent Cetraro meeting on High-Performance Computing and Grids, Miron Livny extended the “show up and see what happens” maxim by offering a corollary, “Show up and avoid doing…
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HPC and Climate Change: Senate Hearing
On Thursday, May 8, I testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology. The full committee hearing was on improving the “Capacity of U.S. Climate Modeling for Decision Makers and End-Users.” The other members of the hearing panel were Jim Hack and I represented the computing and computational science issues, and the…