Next-generation arithmetic: major performance gains with minimal disruption

Abstract

Moore's law made application developers lazy, since they could rely on increases in clock speeds and transistor density to improve the performance of their codes with little or no rewriting required. The frontiers of supercomputing, such as quantum computing, are certainly exciting and promising, but also highly disruptive... even more so than the shift from serial to parallel computing. They require a complete rewrite of millions of lines of software, and the invention of completely different algorithms.