Alliance Revs Up Cloud Computing Research
October 26, 2013
Grazed from EETimes. Author: Jim Ballingall.
A new approach to computer R&D is being born from the rise of mobile systems and the slowing of CMOS scaling. In 2012, several of the world’s leading computer scientists and engineers collaborated on a whitepaper that describes a strategy for computing R&D. The whitepaper sets forth several goals to be achieved by the end of this decade across the spectrum of computing scale from tiny sensors to expansive datacenters.
The goal is to improve the energy efficiency of computers by two to three orders of magnitude. Furthermore we want to realize by the end of this decade an exa-op datacenter that consumes no more than 10 megawatts…
The whitepaper describes a path forward to pursue these goals. The thesis is that cross-layer work in circuits, architecture, and software are essential to make substantial gains and avoid as much as 50 percent dark silicon, effectively unused transistors in a technology node. There will be no shortage of transistors — 50 billion or so available for an 8nm SoC processor. The question is will the advances in architecture and software be sufficient to leverage this enormous sea of transistors effectively, and drive energy efficiency forward by three orders of magnitude…
Read more from the source @ http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1319911