D
Findings and Recommendations from The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?
The following findings and recommendations are repeated from the National Research Council’s report, The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?1
Findings:
- The information technology sector itself and most other sectors of society—for example, manufacturing, financial and other services, science, engineering, education, defense and other government services, and entertainment—have grown dependent on continued growth in computing performance.
- After many decades of dramatic exponential growth, single processor performance is increasing at a much lower rate, and this situation is not expected to improve in the foreseeable future.
- The growth in the performance of computing systems—even if they are multiple-processor parallel systems—will become limited by power consumption within a decade.
- There is no known alternative to parallel systems for sustaining growth in computing performance; however, no compelling programming paradigms for general parallel systems have yet emerged.
Recommendations:
- Invest in research in and development of algorithms that can exploit parallel processing.
- Invest in research in and development of programming methods that will enable efficient use of parallel systems not only by parallel-systems experts but also by typical programmers.
- Focus long-term efforts on rethinking of the canonical computing “stack”—applications, programming language, compiler, runtime, virtual machine, operating system, hypervisor, and architecture—in light of parallelism and resource-management challenges.
- Invest in research on and development of parallel architectures driven by applications, including enhancements of chip multiprocessor systems and conventional data-parallel architectures, cost-effective designs for application-specific architectures, and support for radically different approaches.
- Invest in research and development to make computer systems more power-efficient at all levels of the system, including software, application-specific approaches, and alternative devices. Such efforts should address ways in which software and system architectures can improve power efficiency, such as by exploiting locality and the use of domain-specific execution units. R&D should also be aimed at making logic gates more power-efficient. Such efforts should address alternative physical devices beyond incremental improvements in today’s CMOS circuits.
- To promote cooperation and innovation by sharing, encourage development of open interface standards for parallel programming rather than proliferating proprietary programming environments.
- Invest in the development of tools and methods to transform legacy applications to parallel systems.
- Incorporate in computer science education an increased emphasis on parallelism, and use a variety of methods and approaches to better prepare students for the types of computing resources that they will encounter in their careers.
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1NRC, 2011, The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?, Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press (available online at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12980).