Keynote address II: How's the parallel computing revolution going?

Abstract

Two trends changed the computing landscape over the past decade: (1) hardware vendors started delivering chip multiprocessors (CMPs) instead of uniprocessors, and (2) software developers increasingly chose managed languages instead of native languages. Unfortunately, the former change is disrupting the virtuous-cycle between performance improvements and software innovation. Establishing a new parallel performance virtuous cycle for managed languages will require scalable applications executing on scalable Virtual Machine (VM) services, since the VM schedules, monitors, compiles, optimizes, garbage collects, and executes together with the application. This talk describes current progress, opportunities, and challenges for scalable VM services. The parallel computing revolution urgently needs more innovations.