Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: multicore
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The IT Ecosystem and Global Competitiveness
I recently chaired a U.S. National Academies study on the issues surrounding the end of Dennard scaling and its implications for U.S. industry, defense capabilities and national security. The report, The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security, was just released. It is a cautionary tale about the Gordian…
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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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Surrounded By Opportunities
Our run of good luck is over. We need new, integrated design methodologies and rich collaborations that consider end-to-end design and capability. In many ways, this is a return to the past.
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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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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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SC09 Reflections
The SC09 conference set an attendance record this year – roughly 10,000 attendees at the combined conference and tradeshow – despite the economic malaise of the technology industry and the global economy. One suspects the strong resilience of the conference may be due in part to substantial government investments in very high-performance computing (HPC).