HPC Accelerators with 3D Memory

Artículo invitado, publicado en las actas del congreso por IEEE Society Press. Páginas 320 a 328. ISBN: 978-1-5090-3593-9.DOI 10.1109/CSE-EUC-DCABES-2016.203After a decade evolving in the High Performance Computing arena, GPU-equipped supercomputers have con- quered the top500 and green500 lists, providing us unprecedented levels of computational power and memory bandwidth. This year, major vendors have introduced new accelerators based on 3D memory, like Xeon Phi Knights Landing by Intel and Pascal architecture by Nvidia. This paper reviews hardware features of those new HPC accelerators and unveils potential performance for scientific applications, with an emphasis on Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) used by commercial products according to roadmaps already announced.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucia Tec

Limits on Fundamental Limits to Computation

An indispensable part of our lives, computing has also become essential to industries and governments. Steady improvements in computer hardware have been supported by periodic doubling of transistor densities in integrated circuits over the last fifty years. Such Moore scaling now requires increasingly heroic efforts, stimulating research in alternative hardware and stirring controversy. To help evaluate emerging technologies and enrich our understanding of integrated-circuit scaling, we review fundamental limits to computation: in manufacturing, energy, physical space, design and verification effort, and algorithms. To outline what is achievable in principle and in practice, we recall how some limits were circumvented, compare loose and tight limits. We also point out that engineering difficulties encountered by emerging technologies may indicate yet-unknown limits.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Hardware implementations of computer-generated holography: a review

Computer-generated holography (CGH) is a technique to generate holographic interference patterns. One of the major issues related to computer hologram generation is the massive computational power required. Hardware accelerators are used to accelerate this process. Previous publications targeting hardware platforms lack performance comparisons between different architectures and do not provide enough information for the evaluation of the suitability of recent hardware platforms for CGH algorithms. We aim to address these limitations and present a comprehensive review of CGH-related hardware implementations

Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think

This paper explores the role of the traditional computational metaphor in our thinking as computer scientists, its influence on epistemological styles, and its implications for our understanding of cognition. It proposes to replace the conventional metaphor--a sequence of steps--with the notion of a community of interacting entities, and examines the ramifications of such a shift on these various ways in which we think