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Re-Thinking Computer Architecture

Vint Cerf

January 2011

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Warnings

1. Does the speaker really know anything about computer architecture and hardware?

Ans: NO

2. Does the speaker have any ideas worth discussing?

Ans: Who knows?

3. Will we have a chance to throw eggs and tomatoes?

Ans: Gosh, I hope not!!

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Parallelism tactics

• MIMD

• SIMD

• Pipelines

• MAP/Reduce (confine data to active memory)

• “natural parallelism” – Cryptanalysis (chunks of key space/processor)

– Large numbers of diverse, small tasks (web page responses)

• Big issues: intermediate data movement, pre-computation structuring (anecdote: Illiac IV 1024 bit wide, 64 processor skewed data setup and Glypnir programming language)

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Notions

• Multicore chips have I/O problems: keeping the processors busy

• on and off-chip interconnects. Optical??

• What do datacenters look like? (memory and processing are “embedded in racks together”)

• Does this remind you of memristors? Single magnetic element stores and processes.

• Recent quantum entanglement effects (time and space) - my head hurts.

• Role of FPGAs in specialized, rapid computations

• What about GPUs?

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Cloud Notions

• Data replication for parallel operation

• Data replication for redundancy (resilience)

• Inter-Cloud standards– Data transfers, access control and protection, meta-data

– Is a laptop, notebook, mobile a cloudlet?

– Coordinated computations among clouds?

– Data Liberation (“all your data are not belong to us”)

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Chrome OS and Chrome (browser)

• These minimize what you carry - all the interesting stuff is in the cloud

• If the hardware platform is entirely web-oriented, does this simplify the hardware design? Microcode?

• What if airplane seats had pure browser on board? Would access to the cloud work satisfactorily?

• What if you got a keyboard and a high resolution display when you check into the hotel room?

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Hacks

• Sony Playstation 3 supercomputer

• @home computations (SETI, protein folding, etc)

• Character recognition with CAPTCHAS

• others?