The next resource war
Simon W. Moore, Daniel L. Greenfield · 2008
Scaling of electronics technology has brought us to a pivotal point in the design of computational devices. Technology scaling favours transistors over wires which has led us into an era where communication takes more time and consumes more power than the computation itself. This technology driver inevitably pushes us toward a communication-centric approach to computer system design from both hardware and software perspectives. As a consequence the data movement in time and space exhibited by algorithms will need to be understood to undertake system-level performance predictions. We demonstrate that algorithms exhibit fractal like communication behaviour which is likely to help with such an analysis.