Clouds, clusters and ManyCore: The revolution ahead

Abstract

Without doubt, scientific discovery, business practice and social interactions are moving rapidly from a world of homogeneous and local systems to a world of distributed software, virtual organizations and cloud computing infrastructure, all powered by multicore processors and large-scale infrastructure. In science, a tsunami of new experimental and computational data and a suite of increasingly ubiquitous sensors pose vexing problems in data analysis, transport, visualization and collaboration. In society and business, software as a service and cloud computing are empowering distributed groups. Letpsilas step back and think about the longer term future. Where is the technology going and what are the implications? What architectures are appropriate? How to we manage power and scale? What are the right size building blocks? How do we come to grips with the fact that our clusters and data centers are now bigger than the Internet was just a few years ago? How do we develop and support malleable software? What is the ecosystem of components in which distributed, data rich applications will operate? How do we optimize performance and reliability? How do we program these systems?