The New Landscape of Parallel Computing Architecture John Shalf, LBNL

The past 2 years has seen a sea change in computer architecture that will impact every facet of our society as every electronic device from cell phone to supercomputer will need to confront parallelism of unprecedented scale. Whereas the conventional manycore approach (2, 4, and even 8 cores) adopted by the computing industry will eventually run out of steam, the highest performance per watt and per chip area is achieved using manycore technology (hundreds or even thousdands of cores). However, fully unleashing the potential of the manycore approach to ensure future advances in sustained computational performance will require fundamental advances in computer architecture and programming models that are nothing short of reinventing computing.