Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics
From Microprocessors to Nanostores: Rethinking Data-Centric Systems
What will future computing systems look like?
We are entering an exciting era for systems design. Historically, the first computer to achieve terascale computing (1012, or one trillion operations per second) was demonstrated in the late 1990s. In the 2000s, the first petascale computer was demonstrated with a thousand-times better performance. Extrapolating these trends, we can expect the first exascale computer (with one million trillion operations per second) to appear around the end of this next decade.
In addition to continued advances in performance, we are also seeing tremendous improvements in power, sustainability, manageability, reliability, and scalability. Power management, in particular, is now a first-class design consideration. Recently, system designs have gone beyond optimizing operational energy consumption to examining the total life-cycle energy consumption of systems for improved environmental sustainability. Similarly, in addition to introducing an exciting new model for delivering computing, the emergence of cloud computing has enabled significant advances in scalability as well as innovations in the software stack.
Looking further out, emerging technologies such as photonics, nonvolatile memory, 3D stacking, and new datacentric workloads offer compelling new opportunities. The confluence of these trends motivates a rethinking of the basic systems’ building blocks of the future and a likely new design approach called nanostores that focus on data-centric workloads and hardware-software codesign for upcoming technologies.
