21st Century Computer Architecture.pdfVIP

21st Century Computer Architecture A community white paper May 25, 2012 1. Introduction and Summary Information and communication technology ICT is transforming our world, including healthcare, education, science, commerce, government, defense, and entertainment. It is hard to remember that 20 years ago the first step in information search involved a trip to the library, 10 years ago social networks were mostly physical, and 5 years ago “tweets” came from cartoon characters. Importantly, much evidence suggests that ICT innovation is accelerating with many compelling 1 visions moving from science fiction toward reality . Appendix A both touches upon these visions and seeks to distill their attributes. Future visions include personalized medicine to target care and drugs to an individual, sophisticated social network analysis of potential terrorist threats to aid homeland security, and telepresence to reduce the greenhouse gases spent on commuting. Future applications will increasingly require processing on large, heterogeneous data sets “Big 2 Data” , using distributed designs, working within form-factor constraints, and reconciling rapid deployment with efficient operation. Two key—but often invisible—enablers for past ICT innovation have been semiconductor technology and computer architecture. Semiconductor innovation has repeatedly provided more transistors Moore’s Law for roughly constant power and cost per chip Dennard Scaling . Computer architects took these rapid transistor budget increases and discovered innovative techniques to scale processor performance and mitigate memory system losses. The combined effect of technology and architecture has provided ICT innovators with exponential performance growth at near constant cost. Because most technology and computer architecture innovations were intentionally invisible to higher layers, application and other so