@HPCpodcast-83: Attack of Killer Chiplets, w John Shalf

Reminiscent of the so-called “Attack of Killer Micros” which heralded the arrival of microprocessors in the early 1990s, the “Attack of Killer Chiplets” and similar technologies like Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRA) are coming to enable specialized architectures, re-define computing, and provide new avenues for advancing supercomputing speed and energy efficiency.

Special guest and last year’s ISC-2023 program chair John Shalf joins Shahin and Doug to discuss the rise of specialized architectures in the Post Moore’a Law era. This is a topic John will discuss at Wednesday night’s keynote at the ISC conference in Hamburg, Germany (https://www.isc-hpc.com/agenda-2024.html) next week. John is department head for computer science research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He formerly was CTO at the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC).

John is a coauthor of over 60 publications in the field of parallel computing software and HPC technology, including three best papers and the widely cited report “The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley” (with David Patterson and others). He also coauthored “ExaScale Software Study: Software Challenges in Extreme Scale Systems,” which sets the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA’s) information technology research investment strategy for the next decade. He was a member of the Berkeley Lab/NERSC team that won a 2002 R&D 100 Award for the RAGE robot.