Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: A Disciplined Approach to Scaling in the Post-Moore's Law Era

General-purpose processor speeds have not increased at their historical rates for over 15-years. Designers have instead offered scalable computing systems with additional barriers to realizing the performance gains that once came "for free" with each processor generation. This situation has slowed the progress of all endeavors that involve scalable computing.

A disciplined approach to reversing this trend must start and end with a direct engagement with the scalable-system users and programmers faced with these barriers. With this goal, the investigators are performing in-depth face-to-face interviews with a broad set of users. In addition, with these users, the project team is also examining codes, exchanging ideas, and offering assistance.

This is producing a deep understanding of how users are coping with their growing demands for computing while computing is placing more demands upon them. The project’s novelties are this in-depth study and the resulting formulation of an approach to address the limitations of scalable computing based on real users' needs. The project’s impacts are the dissemination of the survey results and a recommended approach forward that restores meaningful layers of abstraction to scalable systems, freeing programmers from being drawn deeper into the complexity of scalable computing while delivering higher performance to them.

The investigators performed a similar study in 2011. With this planning grant: (1) They are conducting a more ambitious study with a

greater diversity of subjects. By re-engaging as many 2011 subjects as possible, this becomes a longitudinal study capable of revealing

trends not visible in any single point-in-time study. (2) The investigators are using these interactions to explore transitioning

their foundational work to practice, to build a larger team, and to expand the scope of future work. The results of the 2011 study inspired the investigators to produce breakthroughs in speculation, dependence handling, latency tolerance, and automatic parallelization. The 2021 study serves as a vehicle to explore ways to transition these results to practice. (3) The investigators believe that hardware can be more domain-adept without being domain-specific.

Using prior insights, they are exploring hardware/software concepts that deliver top performance levels without undue programmer burden. By testing these ideas in the context of the study, the investigators can best frame the problem, refine approaches, and test hypotheses in the context of actual needs, opportunities, and constraints. All of these activities ensure that future work in scalable systems will have greater impact.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.