Whither computing
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Inside: EDITORIAL
Whither computing ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Materials opportunities and challenges for low-energy computing: Thermal management and interconnects ENERGY SECTOR ANALYSIS
Reviving hydrogen as an energy carrier
ENERGY QUARTERLY ORGANIZERS CHAIR Y. Shirley Meng, University of California, San Diego, USA Andrea Ambrosini, Sandia National Laboratories, USA Kristen Brown, Electron, UK David Cahen, Weizmann Institute, Israel Russell R. Chianelli, The University of Texas at El Paso, USA George Crabtree, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Brian J. Ingram, Argonne National Laboratory, USA Elizabeth A. Kócs, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Sabrina Sartori, University of Oslo, Norway Subhash L. Shinde, University of Notre Dame, USA Anke Weidenkaff, Fraunhofer IWKS and Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University, The State University of New York, USA Steve M. Yalisove, University of Michigan, USA
“Materials opportunities and challenges for low-energy computing: Thermal management and interconnects” title image credit: The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Reviving hydrogen as an energy carrier” title image credit: Shutterstock.
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Whither computing “A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.” —Emo Philips “There is plenty of room at the bottom.” —Richard P. Feynman
There is a significant push toward mimicking biological systems in the computing machinery of tomorrow, including perception and cognition displayed by rat brains and the vast information storage present in DNA (e.g., Exabytes of storage in small DNA clusters), which Feynman alluded to in his APS Meeting talk in 1959. Some of us worked in hardware in the early 1980s and focused on addressing issues related to hierarchical interconnects, thermal management, and transistor performance. Even then, leadership was cognizant that making generational advances in device density on chips came with substantial challenges to off-chip interconnects and thermal management. The system-level software and hardware architecture gurus had to be made aware that how they map processes on the devices could lead to hot spots, and micron-scale hot regions could drop chip speeds by an order of magnitude. It was then that system technology co-design and co-optimization began to take full effect.With significant advances in lithography and resultant device miniaturization, the need for higher density off-chip interconnections grew, leading to smaller bump-sizes in IBM’s controlled collapse of chip connects (C4) technologies. The hot spots kept becoming hotter, despite directed efforts to reduce them, leading to many novel thermal management solutions. Work on high-performance computing helped to further understand the overall optimization of the “computing stack.” Research directions, pursued then by the semiconductor physics, interconnects, and th
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