Achieving energy efficiency by HW/SW co-design

Abstract

Summary form only given. Compute performance increased by orders of magnitude in the last few decades, made possible by continued technology scaling, increasing frequency, providing integration capacity to realize novel architectures, and reducing energy to keep power dissipation within limit. The technology treadmill will continue, and one would expect to reach Exascale level performance this decade; however, it's the same Physics that helped you in the past will now pose some barriers-Business as usual will not be an option. The energy and power will pose as a major challenge- an Exascale machine would consume in excess of a Giga-watt! Memory & communication bandwidth with conventional technology would be prohibitive. Orders of magnitude increased parallelism, let alone extreme parallelism due to energy saving techniques, would increase unreliability. And programming system will be posed with even severe challenge of harnessing the performance with concurrency. We will discuss potential solutions in all disciplines, such as circuit design, system architecture, system software, programming system, and resiliency to pave the road towards Exascale performance.