Marcus Cake

I have previously pondered the potential of Moore’s law in the article Moores Law: Will you be able to run a bank from your laptop in Starbucks on a desert island?. The following article provides an update.

Where’s the software to catch up to multicore computing?, Information week, 29 January 2007

Extract:

• IBM’s chief architect for next-generation systems software wonders how far we’ll be able to push the software required to take advantage of supercomputer-class machines.In terms of available floating-point operations per second on processors and systems, Moore’s Law hasn’t yet reached its limits. But in terms of usable performance by most software–even advanced technical computing software–perhaps it already has.A look at the Top500 Supercomputer Sites List (www.top500.org) shows that a large portion of the technical computing workload has moved to commodity Linux clusters: commodity servers, commodity networks and commodity storage. At the same time, novel multicore processor architectures, such as the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE), show the potential for substantial computing power (hundreds of gigaflops) to reside in entry-level servers, with, say, two to four processors.
• With so much computing power so readily accessible–whether in systems-on-chip or commodity clusters–companies and industries of all sizes anywhere in the world, and perhaps even individuals, may be able to tap this power to solve more problems than ever before. There’s only one problem: Where’s the software to take advantage of all these processors, cores and threads? For the most part, it’s not there yet–even in areas historically focused on leading-edge technology enablement, such as technical computing.
• As architectures become more complex, from the multicore microprocessor to hybrid systems like Roadrunner; as supercomputing power becomes a commodity; and as developers still seek to get more performance out of their software without having to rely on the rate of “frequency bumps” that prevailed in the past, we are focused on keeping application development simple–forcing the art of the engineering into the framework enablement, not the application development. And by returning to a simpler way of doing things, we allow the software to catch up with advances in silicon, making teraflops on the desktop not just a feasible technical accomplishment, but a useful one as well.

Intel, IBM separately reveal transistor breakthrough for smaller, energy-efficient chips, Wednesday, January 31, 2007 By Jordan Robertson, The Associated PressExtract:

• In dueling announcements, Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. separately say they have solved a puzzle perplexing the semiconductor industry about how to reduce energy loss in microchip transistors as the technology shrinks to the atomic scale.
• Companies are feverishly trying to discover new ways to adhere to Moore’s Law, the 1965 prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip should double about every two years.
• But scientists in recent years have reported serious problems in stopping electric current from leaking out of the tiniest chip parts, threatening to halt the march of Moore’s Law.
  The problem is that the silicon dioxide used for more than 40 years as an insulator inside transistors has been shaved so thin that an increasing amount of current is seeping through, wasting electricity and generating unnecessary heat.
• “This gives the entire chip industry a new life in terms of Moore’s Law, in all three of the big metrics — performance, power consumption and transistor density,” said David Lammers, director of WeSRCH.com, a social networking Web site for semiconductor enthusiasts and part of VLSI Research Inc. “It opens the door to some pretty rapid improvements.”

In an era of open source, the most prudent approach is to adopt an open source framework and undertake application development to develop the functionality to satisfy specific market needs. If Moore’s law continues, then the cost of hardware will continue to decline and the ability to run a bank from a desert island a reality. The ability of software to take advantage of these hardware advantages may be limited. The advances in hardware and emergence of Utility computing will overcome much of the limitation. The result will be unpredented opportunity for entrepreneurs to create applications to global audiences in an increasingly service oriented world. Linux is likely to be best placed to take advantage of advances in hardware.
Note: Utility computing is a significant development. Additional information on Utility computing is available at Utility computing and Elasticlive . Elasticlive uses the same technology as Amazon.com that can provide additional power by adding lower cost servers to large group of computers or grid. I plan to learn more and write a quality article on utility computing.