National Academies Press: OpenBook

The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security (2012)

Chapter: Appendix D: Findings and Recommendations from *The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?*

« Previous: Appendix C: Contributors to the Study
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Findings and Recommendations from *The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?*." National Research Council. 2012. The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13472.
×

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.

_______________

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).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Findings and Recommendations from *The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?*." National Research Council. 2012. The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13472.
×

This page intentionally left blank.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Findings and Recommendations from *The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?*." National Research Council. 2012. The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13472.
×
Page 67
Suggested Citation:"Appendix D: Findings and Recommendations from *The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?*." National Research Council. 2012. The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13472.
×
Page 68
Next: Appendix E: Dennard Scaling and Implications »
The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $41.00 Buy Ebook | $32.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

Computing and information and communications technology (ICT) has dramatically changed how we work and live, has had profound effects on nearly every sector of society, has transformed whole industries, and is a key component of U.S. global leadership. A fundamental driver of advances in computing and ICT has been the fact that the single-processor performance has, until recently, been steadily and dramatically increasing year over years, based on a combination of architectural techniques, semiconductor advances, and software improvements. Users, developers, and innovators were able to depend on those increases, translating that performance into numerous technological innovations and creating successive generations of ever more rich and diverse products, software services, and applications that had profound effects across all sectors of society. However, we can no longer depend on those extraordinary advances in single-processor performance continuing. This slowdown in the growth of single-processor computing performance has its roots in fundamental physics and engineering constraints--multiple technological barriers have converged to pose deep research challenges, and the consequences of this shift are deep and profound for computing and for the sectors of the economy that depend on and assume, implicitly or explicitly, ever-increasing performance. From a technology standpoint, these challenges have led to heterogeneous multicore chips and a shift to alternate innovation axes that include, but are not limited to, improving chip performance, mobile devices, and cloud services. As these technical shifts reshape the computing industry, with global consequences, the United States must be prepared to exploit new opportunities and to deal with technical challenges. The New Global Ecosystem in Advanced Computing: Implications for U.S. Competitiveness and National Security outlines the technical challenges, describe the global research landscape, and explore implications for competition and national security.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!