Read this Register interview to find out what Professor Onur Mutlu of ETH Zürich thinks about the compute architecture we should be deploying to meet next generation requirements.
The Register: If we look at the way computing architecture works today, what are the challenges and shortcomings of this model?There are major issues with the way we design compute systems today. One of the biggest is that although datasets are growing, and we're trying to do more sophisticated things with them, the components that do the actual computation are a very small fraction of the system.
There are further applications where gains have been noted by others. For example with large graphs where you are looking to find structure, such as those used by social networks. Moving data occupies most of the time and energy. When you offload that to the memory and storage system you get huge improvements. You get around 14x performance improvement and around 10x energy efficiency improvement. If you compound all these gains, you get around 100x improvement.
There will inevitably be some pain where change is involved. We'll all need to work a little bit harder. Programming models and system software support will not be perfect from Day One. But over time, as more an more examples of this data-centric approach appear, we'll see the energy and performance benefits revealed more clearly. The software stack will adapt. It's not an overnight transition, but there's certainly a very pressing need for it to happen as soon as possible.
Professor Onur Mutlu works at ETH Zürich, a world leading public research university in Switzerland. He is also visiting Professor at Stanford University, and Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. Along with a number of colleagues and collaborators, he has been heavily influential in the development of commercial microprocessors and memory/storage systems.