The future of computing, even as it is energized by the momentum of commercial semiconductor advances in the near term, will be challenged by critical emerging barriers in device physics, fabrication processes, heat, failures, concurrency, cost, and complexity. Radical departure from today's conventional practices and paradigms will be essential to vault the approaching capability chasm threatening future progress as a consequence of the inevitable flat-lining of Moore's Law in the nanoscale regime.

If the promise of continued performance gain to the hands of science, technology, defense, and society as a whole, a deep understanding of these impending stalling factors must be acquired, innovative strategies identified, and new technology trajectories plotted. It is imperative that from these insights a new roadmap be established for long term research in fundamental physics, device fabrication, models of parallel computation and programming, parallel algorithms, system structures and architectures, and user environments.

To that end, experts across a wide array of interrelated disciplines are coming together to assemble a first-ever map of the final trade-off space and possible paths through it to secure a a healthy future for US innovation and capability in computing. These workshops on the frontiers of extreme computing will undertake to expose and characterize these barriers and project possible solution paths, proposing research directions to be initiated to ultimately address them.

Pending Workshops:

Fault-Tolerant Spaceborne Computing Employing New Technologies, 2010, May 25-26, 2010, Albuquerque, NM, USA (working groups May 24 and 27)

Past Workshops:

Fault-Tolerant Spaceborne Computing Employing New Technologies, 2009, May 26-29, 2009, Albuquerque, NM, USA

2020 Computing: Virtual Immersion Architectures (VIA-2020), SRC/NSF/ITRS Forum on Emerging nano-CMOS Architectures in conjunction with Frontiers of Extreme Computing 2008, July 10-11, 2008, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Fault-Tolerant Spaceborne Computing Employing New Technologies, May 28-30, 2008, Albuquerque, NM, USA

Frontiers of Extreme Computing 2007, October 21-25, 2007, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

Frontiers of Extreme Computing 2005, October 23-27, 2005, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

The Path to Extreme Supercomputing, October 12, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA


Contact: Erik P. DeBenedictis, Sandia National Laboratories, (505) 284-4017
Modified on: February 24, 2010