Fuller S.H., Millett L.I. The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

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The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

Samuel H. Fuller and Lynette I. Millett, Editors

Committee on Sustaining Growth in Computing Performance

Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

Division on Engineering and Physical Science

Game Over or

Next Level?

T H E F U T U R E O F

COMPUTING PERFORMANCE

The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

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award CNS-0630358. Any opinions, ﬁndings, conclusions, or recommendations

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the views of the organization that provided support for the project.

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The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

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The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINING GROWTH

IN COMPUTING PERFORMANCE

SAMUEL H. FULLER, Analog Devices Inc., Chair

LUIZ ANDRÉ BARROSO, Google, Inc.

ROBERT P. COLWELL, Independent Consultant

WILLIAM J. DALLY, NVIDIA Corporation and Stanford University

DAN DOBBERPUHL, P.A. Semi

PRADEEP DUBEY, Intel Corporation

MARK D. HILL, University of Wisconsin–Madison

MARK HOROWITZ, Stanford University

DAVID KIRK, NVIDIA Corporation

MONICA LAM, Stanford University

KATHRYN S. McKINLEY, University of Texas at Austin

CHARLES MOORE, Advanced Micro Devices

KATHERINE YELICK, University of California, Berkeley

Staff

LYNETTE I. MILLETT, Study Director

SHENAE BRADLEY, Senior Program Assistant

The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

COMPUTER SCIENCE AND TELECOMMUNICATIONS BOARD

ROBERT F. SPROULL, Sun Labs, Chair

PRITHVIRAJ BANERJEE, Hewlett Packard Company

STEVEN M. BELLOVIN, Columbia University

WILLIAM J. DALLY, NVIDIA Corporation and Stanford University

SEYMOUR E. GOODMAN, Georgia Institute of Technology

JOHN E. KELLY, III, IBM

JON M. KLEINBERG, Cornell University

ROBERT KRAUT, Carnegie Mellon University

SUSAN LANDAU, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

PETER LEE, Microsoft Corporation

DAVID LIDDLE, US Venture Partners

WILLIAM H. PRESS, University of Texas

PRABHAKAR RAGHAVAN, Yahoo! Research

DAVID E. SHAW, Columbia University

ALFRED Z. SPECTOR, Google, Inc.

JOHN SWAINSON, Silver Lake Partners

PETER SZOLOVITS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PETER J. WEINBERGER, Google, Inc.

ERNEST J. WILSON, University of Southern California

JON EISENBERG, Director

RENEE HAWKINS, Financial and Administrative Manager

HERBERT S. LIN, Chief Scientist

LYNETTE I. MILLETT, Senior Program Ofﬁcer

EMILY ANN MEYER, Program Ofﬁcer

ENITA A. WILLIAMS, Associate Program Ofﬁcer

VIRGINIA BACON TALATI, Associate Program Ofﬁcer

SHENAE BRADLEY, Senior Program Assistant

ERIC WHITAKER, Senior Program Assistant

For more information on CSTB, see its website at

http://www.cstb.org, write to CSTB, National Research Council,

500 Fifth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001, call (202) 334-2605,

or e-mail the CSTB at cstb@nas.edu.

The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

vii

Preface

ast, inexpensive computers are now essential for nearly all human

endeavors and have been a critical factor in increasing economic

productivity, enabling new defense systems, and advancing the

frontiers of science. But less well understood is the need for ever-faster

computers at ever-lower costs. For the last half-century, computers have

been doubling in performance and capacity every couple of years. This

remarkable, continuous, exponential growth in computing performance

has resulted in an increase by a factor of over 100 per decade and more

than a million in the last 40 years. For example, the raw performance of

a 1970s supercomputer is now available in a typical modern cell phone.

That uninterrupted exponential growth in computing throughout the

lifetimes of most people has resulted in the expectation that such phenom-

enal progress, often called Moore’s law, will continue well into the future.

Indeed, societal expectations for increased technology performance con-

tinue apace and show no signs of slowing, a trend that underscores the

need to ﬁnd ways to sustain exponentially increasing performance in

multiple dimensions.

The essential engine that made that exponential growth possible is

now in considerable danger. Thermal-power challenges and increasingly

expensive energy demands pose threats to the historical rate of increase in

processor performance. The implications of a dramatic slowdown in how

quickly computer performance is increasing—for our economy, our mili-

tary, our research institutions, and our way of life—are substantial. That

obstacle to continuing growth in computing performance is by now well

The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

viii PREFACE

understood by the designers of microprocessors. Their initial response

was to design multiprocessor (often referred to as multicore) chips, but

fundamental challenges in algorithm and software design limit the wide-

spread use of multicore systems.

Even as multicore hardware systems are tailored to support software

that can exploit multiple computation units, thermal constraints will con-

tinue to be a primary concern. It is estimated that data centers delivering

Internet services consume over 1.5 percent of U.S. electric power. As the

use of the Internet continues to grow and massive computing facilities

are demanding that performance keep doubling, devoting correspond-

ing increases in the nation’s electrical energy capacity to computing may

become too expensive.

We do not have new software approaches that can exploit the innova-

tive architectures, and so sustaining performance growth—and its atten-

dant beneﬁts—presents a major challenge. The present study emerged

from discussions among members of the Computer Science and Telecom-

munications Board and was sponsored by the National Science Foun-

dation. The original statement of task for the Committee on Sustaining

Growth in Computing Performance is as follows:

This study will bring together academic and industry researchers, ap-

plication developers, and members of the user community to explore

emerging challenges to sustaining performance growth and meeting

expectations in computing across the broad spectrum of software, hard-

ware, and architecture. It will identify key problems along with promis-

ing emerging technologies and models and describe how these might ﬁt

together over time to enable continued performance scaling. In addition,

it will focus attention on areas where there are tractable problems whose

solution would have signiﬁcant payback and at the same time highlight

known solutions to challenges that already have them. The study will

outline a research, development, and educational agenda for meeting the

emerging computing needs of the 21st century.

Parallelism and related approaches in software will increase in impor-

tance as a path to achieving continued performance growth. There have

been promising developments in the use of parallel processing in some

scientiﬁc applications, Internet search and retrieval, and the processing of

visual and graphic images. This report reviews that progress and recom-

mends subjects for further research and development. Chapter 1 exam-

ines the need for high-performance computers, and computers that are

increasingly higher-performing, in a variety of sectors of society. The

need may be intuitively obvious to some readers but is included here to

be explicit about the need for continued performance growth. Chapter 2

examines the aspects of “performance” in depth. Often used as short-

hand for speed, performance is actually a much more multidimensional

The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

PREFACE ix

concept. (Appendix A provides a brief history of computing performance

as a complement to Chapter 2.) Chapter 3 delves into the fundamen-

tal reasons why single-processor performance has stopped its dramatic,

exponential growth and why this is a fundamental change rather than a

temporary nuisance. Chapter 4 addresses the fundamental challenge now

facing the computer science and engineering community: how to exploit

parallelism in software and hardware. Chapter 5 outlines the committee’s

recommended research, practice, and education agenda to meet those

challenges.

This report represents the cooperative effort of many people. The

members of the study committee, after substantial discussions, drafted

and worked though several revisions of the report. We particularly appre-

ciate the insights and perspectives provided by the following experts who

briefed the committee:

Jeff Dean, Google,

Robert Doering, Texas Instruments,

Michael Foster, National Science Foundation,

Garth Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University,

Wen-Mei Hwu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,

Bruce Jacob, University of Maryland,

Jim Larus, Microsoft,

Charles Leiserson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

Trevor Mudge, University of Michigan,

Daniel Reed, Microsoft,

Phillip Rosedale, Linden Lab,

Vivek Sarkar, Rice University,

Kevin Skadron, University of Virginia,

Tim Sweeny, Epic Games, and

Tom Williams, Synopsys.

The committee also thanks the reviewers who provided many percep-

tive comments that helped to improve the content of the report materi-

ally. The committee thanks Michael Marty, who worked with committee

member Mark Hill to update some of the graphs, and Paul S. Diette of the

Diette Group, who assisted in reﬁning the images. The committee appreci-

ates the ﬁnancial support provided by the National Science Foundation.

The committee also gratefully acknowledges the assistance of members

of the National Research Council staff. Lynette Millett, our study direc-

tor, ably served the critical roles of study organizer, report editor, and

review coordinator. Jon Eisenberg provided many valuable suggestions

that improved the quality of the ﬁnal report.

It is difﬁcult to overstate the importance of ever-more-capable com-