The Future of Computing Performance Game Over or Next Level? (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 5-20
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From page 5... ...
If parallel programming and related software efforts fail to become widespread, the development of exciting new applications that drive the computer industry will stall; if such innovation stalls, many other parts of the economy will follow suit. This report of the Committee on Sustaining Growth in Computing Performance describes the factors that have led to the future limitations on growth for single processors based on complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS)
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From page 6... ...
The term Moore's law, which originally referred to an empirical observation about the most economically favorable rate for industry to increase the number of transistors on a chip, has come to be associated, at least popularly, with the expectation that microprocessors will become faster, that communication bandwidth will increase, that storage will become less expensive, and, more broadly, that computers will become faster. Most notably, the performance of individual computer processors increased on the order of 10,000 times over the last 2 decades of the 20th century without substantial increases in cost or power consumption.
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From page 7... ...
value -- such as improved security, reliability, and other trustworthiness features -- without degrading the performance of existing functions; · Using higher-level abstractions, programming languages, and systems that require more computing power but reduce develop ment time and improve software quality by making the devel opment of correct programs and the integration of components easier; and · Anticipating performance improvements and creating innovative, computationally intensive applications even before the required performance is available at low cost.
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From page 8... ...
Since a chip's power consumption is proportional to the clock speed times the supply voltage squared, the inability to continue to lower the supply voltage halted the ability to increase the clock speed without increasing power dissipation. The resulting power consumption exceeded the few hundred watts per chip level that can practically be dissipated in a mass-market computing device as well as the practical limits for mobile, battery-powered devices.
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From page 9... ...
Other processor design choices impact processor performance, but clock rate is a domi nant processor performance determinant.
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From page 10... ...
Even with success in sidestepping the limits on single-processor performance, total energy consumption will remain an important concern, and growth in performance will become limited by power consumption within a decade. The total energy consumed by computing systems is already substantial and continues to grow rapidly in the United States and around the world.
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From page 11... ...
Most software developers today think and program by using a sequential programming model to create software for single generalpurpose microprocessors. The microprocessor industry has already begun to deliver parallel hardware in mainstream products with chip multi processors (CMPs -- sometimes referred to as multicore)
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From page 12... ...
RECOMMENDATIONS The committee's findings outline a set of serious challenges that affect not only the computing industry but also the many sectors of society that now depend on advances in IT and computation, and they suggest national and global economic repercussions. At the same time, the crisis in computing performance has pointed the way to new opportunities for innovation in diverse software and hardware infrastructures that excel in metrics other than single-chip processing performance, such as low power consumption and aggregate delivery of throughput cycles.
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From page 13... ...
Recommendations for Research The committee urges investment in several crosscutting areas of research, including algorithms, broadly usable parallel programming methods, rethinking the canonical computing stack, parallel architectures, and power efficiency. Recommendation: Invest in research in and development of algorithms that can exploit parallel processing.
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From page 14... ...
Writ ing software that expresses the type of parallelism required to exploit chip multiprocessor hardware requires new software engineering processes and tools, including new programming languages that ease the expression of parallelism and a new software stack that can exploit and map the parallelism to hardware that is diverse and evolving. It will also require training programmers to solve their problems with parallel computational thinking.
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From page 15... ...
Recommendation: 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. In addition to innovation and advancements in parallel programming models and systems, advances in architecture and hardware will play an important role.
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From page 16... ...
However, it will also be essential to invest in new computation substrates whose underlying power efficiency promises to be fundamentally better than that of silicon-based CMOS circuits. Computing has benefited in the past from order-of-magnitude performance improvements in power consumption in the progression from vacuum tubes to discrete bipolar transistors to integrated circuits first based on bipolar transistors, then on N-type metal oxide semiconductors (NMOS)
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From page 17... ...
Because computing systems are increasingly limited by energy con sumption and power dissipation, it is essential to invest in research and development to make computing systems more power-efficient. Exploiting parallelism alone cannot ensure continued growth in computer performance.
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From page 18... ...
However, the current design trend is away from building customized solutions, because increasing design complexity has caused the nonrecurring engineering costs for designing the chips to grow rapidly. High costs limit the range of potential market segments to the few that have volume high enough to justify the initial engineering investment.
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From page 19... ...
Who will develop the parallel software of the future? To sustain IT innovation, we will need a workforce that is adept in writing parallel applications that run well on parallel hardware, in creating parallel software systems, and in designing parallel hardware.
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From page 20... ...
CONCLUDING REMARKS There is no guarantee that we can make future parallel computing ubiquitous and as easy to use as yesterday's sequential computer, but unless we aggressively pursue efforts as suggested by the recommenda tions above, it will be game over for future growth in computing performance. This report describes the factors that have led to limitations of growth of single processors based on CMOS technology.
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