Energy-efficient E-puting everywhere

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s and much of the 2000s, the halls of high-performance computing (HPC) echoed with sentiments like the following: "In HPC, no one cares about energy efficiency or power consumption, and no one ever will." While such extreme talk has subsided, computational performance (or speed) via parallelism still rule the roost. Conversely, one could argue that the consumer electronics space has taken a complementary approach, where energy efficiency and power consumption have been first-order design constraints, with speed only needing to be "good enough" for ordinary daily tasks. However, the increasing computational demands that end users will place on (consumer) electronics, such as computations for personalized medicine, point to the need for "supercomputing in small spaces" (http://sss.cs.vt.edu/). This trend, in turn, will elevate performance to be a first-order design constraint in consumer electronics, on par with energy efficiency and power consumption. This talk will discuss how a "trickle-up" approach will deliver supercomputing in small spaces via an increasingly converged world of energy-efficient (consumer) electronics and computing, or e-puting.