Very Large Scale Spatial Computing

Abstract

The early decades of computing were marked by limited re sources. However, as we enter the twenty-first century, silicon is offering enormous computing resources on a single die and molecular-scale devices appear plausible offering a path to even greater capacities. Exploiting the capacities of these modern and future devices demands different compu tational models and radical shifts in the way we organize, capture, and optimize computations. A key shift is toward spatially organized compu tation. A natural consequence is that the dominant effects which govern our computing space change from the total number of operations and temporal locality to interconnect complexity and spatial locality. Old computational models which hide, ignore, or obfuscate communication and emphasize temporal sequences inhibit the exploitation of these mod ern capacities, motivating the need for new models which make commu nication and spatial organization more apparent.

Additional details