HPCwire: Burton Smith on Reinventing Computing

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May 11, 2007

Burton Smith on Reinventing Computing

-- a preview of his ISC'07 keynote address

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Dr. Burton J. Smith, Microsoft Technical Fellow, former chief scientist at Cray/Tera Computer, and a world-renowned expert in high performance computer architectures and programming languages for parallel computers, will present the opening keynote address at the 2007 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'07) on June 27. His talk, "Reinventing Computing," will look at the ubiquitous deployment of parallel processors and what it could mean for HPC and the larger computing and IT industries. Recently, Smith took some time to answer questions related to his upcoming talk and the computing world of the future.

To hear Smith's keynote in person, register for the ISC'07 at www.isc07.org/registration. The conference, conducted in English, will be held June 26-29 in Dresden, Germany, and advance registration is open through May 26.

Q: The abstract to your upcoming talk at the International Supercomputing Conference says that we are embarking on a new computing age -- the age of massive parallelism. Can you give us a more detailed vision of this new world and what it will mean for those in computing fields and those who rely on computing?

Smith: Moore's Law will continue to improve transistor cost and speed, but single-processor performance will no longer keep pace. There are two possible future scenarios: either computers get a lot cheaper but not much faster, or we use parallel computing to sustain continued performance improvement. In the first case, computing becomes a "mature" industry, and hardware and software become commodities. In the second, consumers will continue to enjoy the benefits of performance improvements, but successful software and hardware providers will have to embrace parallelism to differentiate themselves and compete.

Q: How ubiquitous will multicore processing become? Will everyone have multiple parallel computers at their disposal every day?

Smith: Yes. Even mobile devices will exploit multicore processors, not only for better performance but also to extend battery life by replacing the relatively power-hungry serial processors used today.

Q: As parallel processing devices become the norm in everything from smart phones to GPS systems to laptops, how can (or must) the HPC community take advantage of this new environment?

Smith: The HPC community has been successfully using mainstream hardware for quite a while, but mainstream software has not been adapted for HPC in the same way. However, as parallelism becomes increasingly ubiquitous, HPC should be able to exploit and extend mainstream programming languages, operating systems, development tools, libraries, and even applications intended for smaller scale systems. Also, as more developers successfully exploit parallel computing, the available HPC talent pool will expand.

Q: What should be the plan for vendors in the HPC arena to take advantage of this reconfigured world? Does Microsoft have a strategy for competing in this arena?

Smith: Microsoft has the advantage of being a software supplier to both HPC and the mainstream, which is obviously helpful to us. Other HPC vendors' strategies will be up to them.

Q: What will the workstation of tomorrow look like? Will heterogeneous, multicore processing be the norm? Will laptop and desktop machines be overtaken by parallel processing PDAs?

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