Recent technological trends and their impact on system design

Abstract

Over the past two decades, significant advancements in VLSI technologies (e.g. Moore's Law), Network Bandwidth, and Disk storage capacity have fueled an unprecedented integration of information technologies into the global economy. These advances have enabled the I/T (information technology) community to develop and deploy containerized and composable software stacks, while providing adequate performance to the end users. This model of driving high programmer-productivity with responsiveness in the I/T enterprises is based partly on software containerization, This model also depends significantly on obtaining high performance and robustness from the hardware and the operating systems autonomically. Because programmer-productivity and system responsiveness are key factors for the global economic growth, significant research and development efforts have been invested in continuing the innovations in hardware and operating systems. This talk will discuss the recent technological breakthroughs in VLSI technologies (i.e. high k dielectric) and in disk recording technologies (e.g. perpendicular recording). I will also discuss the impacts of the design decisions in processor designs advancements targeted for the four canonical usage segments, namely, HPC, Commercial computation, Games, and Embedded Systems. I will also speculate on future technological advances that may potentially impact system design.