Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: exascale
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Millions and Billions: Different Questions for Science Funding
All project cost estimates for an exascale initiative suggest it is well in excess of one billion dollars, placing it squarely in the realm of national priority debates. The science and engineering case, though absolutely necessary, is no longer sufficient by itself. One must also marshal arguments that address national, regional and global needs, and…
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Analog Computing: Time for a Comeback?
Use of the word “computer” conjures certain images and brings certain assumptions. One of them, so deeply ingrained that we rarely question it, is that computing is digital. It’s time to reconsider analog computing as an element of computer system design, particularly in a world of near threshold voltage designs, dark silicon, exascale computing and…
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Why We Compute
Why do we, as researchers and practitioners, have this deep and abiding love of computing? Why do we compute? I suspect it is a deeper, more primal yearning, one that underlies all of science and engineering and that unites us in a common cause. It is the insatiable desire to know and understand. From terascale…
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Nothing Lasts Forever
No exponential continues forever, at least outside the mathematics textbooks. All technology-based advances are ultimately limited by something, usually some physical or economic limit. Innovation then shifts to other metrics, against which advances can be measured and valued. Computing is no exception.
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Simple HPC Wins – Usually
You want to be the first person to design a successful, transistorized computer system, not the last person to design vacuum tube computer. As I frequently told my graduate students at Illinois, the great thing about parallel computing is the question never changes – “How can I increase performance?” – but the answers do. Babbage…
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Volcanoes, Travel and Social Networks
Many of us have had family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances stranded far from home by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. At one point, I joked with one friend that he should consider a land route to central Europe, catch the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, kayak across the Bering Strait to Alaska, then drive down…