Slides available here!

Speaker:

Ton Engbersen, IBM, USA

Title:

Where do we go now that core performance has stalled?

Abstract:

For many years, computer performance has doubled every 18-24 months. In the middle of the last decennium this has come to a halt, although chip manufacturers love to keep arguing that computer performance goes up, up, up...! Since mid 1980'ies the cache has been a standard item of each and every computer. It was there for a purpose: hide main memory latency, exploit locality of code and data and improve computer performance. With the emerging trend of Big Data and analytics, code locality and certainly data locality has diminished. The Graph-500 benchmark is today's benchmark, and it is not really about data locality. Through simulation we have actually insights that connecting your CPU (core) directly to a large main memory results in lower power cost for running Big Data analytics workloads. In fact, it looks like that 30 years of 2x performance improvement every 2 years has been invested largely to be more productive in software development. So, what does the future look like? Where are the skills who can program a multi-core chip and get its usage to an acceptable level? In the course of the DOME (www.dome-exascale.nl ) we are experiencing all these difficulties first-hand: by 2021/2022 a computer should be build which processes up to a Exabyte of data per day. In this presentation I will review our latest learning from this project - and hopefully give you some guidance for the future.

Bio:

Ton Engbersen has been with the IBM Research Laboratory since 1980. His career spanned such diverse areas as Image processing, chip design, communications technology, server technology, legacy management, Innovation in Outsourcing and Data center Energy management. Throughout the years he has held a range of management positions in Research and Development in Switzerland and in the US. As member of the IBM Academy of Technology he led the European branch from 2009-2011. Ton holds over 20 patents, has published more then 50 articles in refereed scientific journals and has given over 200 presentations on various subjects concerning his professional work. Currently he is the Scientific Director for the ASTRON-IBM Center of Exascale Technology, and leading the DOME Project (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37361.wss) Ton holds an EE Master from Eindhoven University, Netherlands and a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland.



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