Title: Some of the Past, Some of the Future Speaker: David Resnick Date/Time: Thursday, December 9, 2010, 9:00-10:00AM Location: CSRI Building/Room 279 (Sandia NM) Brief Abstract: There was a very interesting line of vector computers that started with the CDC Star-100 and ended several years later with the ETA-10 line of computer systems. While those systems lost the competition verses the supercomputer systems from Cray Research, there were several good ideas in the architecture of those systems that were very innovative and may offer ideas for future high-end systems. In this talk I will highlight some of these ideas that may be worth revisiting with state of the art microelectronics technology. As new computer architecture ideas and implementations are explored, it will remain that fundamental principles such as data and communication latency will remain as important issues and will often set upper limits on performance. At the same time, if things like processor implementations can be done so that efficiency is significantly increased, the result is doing more work in a smaller area, thus reducing latency. Once the majority of the memory bottleneck is eliminated with the new memory components that are coming, new processor implementations may suggest themselves--ideas that have not been practical to this point. CSRI POC: Jim Ang, 505-844-0068 |