Todays seminar in S7

[Jan Kofron]

Dear all,

the seminar today takes place in S7 in five minutes!

Looking forward!
H.

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Martin Děcký (Huawei Technologies): Data-Centric Computing

In recent decades, the majority of mainstream computer systems we
designed as CPU-centric and memory-centric. All the data that the
computer processed always passed through the main memory in one way or
the other and the code running on the central processor(s) manipulated
the data. DMA controllers, co-processors, GPUs and intelligent NICs were
used mostly as slave peripherals, although with some degree of
computational acceleration and off-loading in recent years. One of the
reasons for keeping the same basic architecture despite its drawbacks
such as the ever-widening memory barrier (i.e. the difference between
the latency of the CPU and the RAM) was arguably its conceptual
simplicity. However, trends for a major change in the status quo are
emerging into the mainstream. There are new non-volatile memory
technologies that promise to marry the benefits of byte-addressable
volatile memory and block-addressable permanent storage. Approaches such
as data-centric computing and near-data processing propose to turn an
ordinary computer into a distributed system where the distinction
between CPU/RAM and peripherals is much more blurry than today, with the
possibility to autonomously compute within and interchange data between
all the hardware components. This talk presents a brief overview of the
concepts and discusses consequences for the design of the software
running on top of this new hardware.