Impact of locality and dimensionality limits on architectural trends

Abstract

Since computing is a physical activity, all forms of computing must obey locality constraints imposed by physics. Unknowingly, many software abstractions violate locality constraints because they represent high dimensional topologies that have higher degrees of freedom than is uniformly implementable by the underlying physical architecture. This semantic gap between abstractions implemented in the virtual architecture and the physical machine resources results in poor performance for certain classes of computing problems. The paper discusses and analyzes the impact of locality constraints and dimensionality limits upon software and architecture trends with the specific goals of improved performance, lower cost, and the longevity of architectural investments.<>