The following is a guest blog from CCC Member Tom Conte of Georgia Tech.
A recent article in SCIENCE, authored by Charles E. Leiserson, Neil Thompson, Joel Emer, Bradley Kuszmaul, Butler Lampson, Daniel Sanchez and Tao Schardl, entitled “There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?” discusses the way forward after the end of technology scaling. (The title is a play on Richard Feynman’s 1959 address to the American Physical Society, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” wherein Feynman observed that miniaturization would lead to what we now call Moore’s Law.) So, what comes after Moore’s Law? The article discusses improvements in software optimization, algorithms and domain specific hardware architectures (what IEEE’s Rebooting Computing notes are going to be the required disruptions in the higher levels of the computing stack). The CCC could not agree more with the authors of the SCIENCE article!
The CCC, through its Systems and Architecture Task Force, and the Post Moore’s Law Computing Task Force that preceded it, has and is continuing to explore these ideas in depth. Here’s a short list for those interested in learning more: Domain-specific hardware acceleration was the topic of the CCC Digital Computing Beyond Moore’s Law workshop (May, 2018). The CCC also sponsored a workshop held in conjunction with the 2016 International Symposium on Computer Architecture: Arch2030: A Vision of Computer Architecture Research over the Next 15 Years. We also took a critical and pragmatic look at quantum computing in the Margaret Martonosi and Martin Roetteler-lead CCC workshop on Next Steps in Quantum Computing: Computer Science’s Role in November 2018. The CCC has explored—and is continuing to explore—some very disruptive yet promising approaches. One example is Thermodynamic Computing (January, 2019): this workshop focused on the potential to use the fundamental properties of open system thermodynamics for extremely energy-efficient computation. (CCC also presented these ideas to NSF recently in May 2020.)
Stay tuned for more CCC workshops on what comes next after Moore’s Law.
