Stephen Pawlowski of Intel gave an interesting keynote today at ISC 2013. He continued the theme of yesterday’s keynote to address challenges our market faces in getting to exascale computing. Here is a summary of the points he made during his talk: Getting to exascale by 2020 requires performance improvement of 2x every year Innovations anticipated include stacked chips and optical layers DRAM is not scaling with Moore’s Law More power goes into transferring data than in computing Need to operate transistors near threshold New materials for DRAM needed. Resistive memory could replace DRAM. Need to explore both the big die and the small die paths as we approach 2020 Big die path leads to 10 billion transistors on a …
ISC 2013 Keynote by Bill Dally of NVIDIA
Bill Dally of NVIDIA gave a wonderful keynote today at ISC 2013. He focused on addressing the challenges facing our market in getting to exascale computing. He talked about how Moore’s law is alive and well because transistors continue to double at an astonishing rate. However, the additional transistors are not translating into the same big performance gains as they did in the 1990’s. Whereas performance used to grow 50% per year, performance today is growing at a much slower pace. The biggest bottleneck to more performance is energy efficiency. Bill showed slides of chips and talked about the picojoules required to compute versus those required to move data and operands around the chip. The take home message was that …