Innovative applications and technology pivots - a perfect storm in computing

Abstract

Since 2006, we have been experiencing two very important developments in computing. One is that tremendous amounts of resources have been invested into innovative applications such as first-principle based models, deep learning and cognitive computing. Many application domains are defying the conventional “it is too expensive” thinking that led to inaccuracies and missed opportunities. The other part is that the industry has been taking a technological path where application performance and power efficiency vary by more than two orders of magnitude depending on their parallelism, heterogeneity, and locality. Today, most of the top supercomputers in the world are heterogeneous parallel computing systems. New standards such as the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) are emerging to facilitate software development. Much has been and needs to be learned about of algorithms, languages, compilers and hardware architecture in these movements. What are the applications that continue to drive the technology development? How will we program these systems? How will innovations in memory and storage devices present further opportunities and challenges? What is the impact on long-term software engineering cost on applications? In this talk, I will present some research opportunities and challenges that are brought about by this perfect storm.