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Hardware Trends: Challenges and Opportunities in Distributed Computing

Published: 04 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This article is about three trends in computer hardware, and some of the challenges and opportunities that I think they provide for the distributed computing community. A common theme in all of these trends is that hardware is moving away from assumptions that have often been made about the relative performance of different operations (e.g., computation versus network communication), the reliability of operations (e.g., that memory accesses are reliable, but network communication is not), and even some of the basic properties of the system (e.g., that the contents of main memory are lost on power failure).
Section 1 introduces "rack-scale" systems and the kinds of properties likely in their interconnect networks. Section 2 describes challenges in systems with shared physical memory but without hardware cache coherence. Section 3 discusses non-volatile byte-addressable memory. The article is based in part on my talk at the ACM PODC 2014 event in celebration of Maurice Herlihy's sixtieth birthday.

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  • (2020)Bounded incoherenceProceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on Programming Models and Applications for Multicores and Manycores10.1145/3380536.3380541(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
  • (2019)SemperOSProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358867(709-722)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
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  1. Hardware Trends: Challenges and Opportunities in Distributed Computing

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      Published In

      cover image ACM SIGACT News
      ACM SIGACT News  Volume 46, Issue 2
      June 2015
      103 pages
      ISSN:0163-5700
      DOI:10.1145/2789149
      Issue’s Table of Contents

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 04 June 2015
      Published in SIGACT Volume 46, Issue 2

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      • (2021)Sharing non‐cache‐coherent memory with bounded incoherenceConcurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience10.1002/cpe.641434:2Online publication date: Jun-2021
      • (2020)Bounded incoherenceProceedings of the Eleventh International Workshop on Programming Models and Applications for Multicores and Manycores10.1145/3380536.3380541(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
      • (2019)SemperOSProceedings of the 2019 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3358807.3358867(709-722)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2019
      • (2019)libMPNodeProceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Programming Models and Applications for Multicores and Manycores10.1145/3303084.3309495(81-90)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2019
      • (2018)Software-Defined “Hardware” Infrastructures: A Survey on Enabling Technologies and Open Research DirectionsIEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials10.1109/COMST.2018.283473120:3(2454-2485)Online publication date: Nov-2019
      • (2015)Databases and hardwareProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/2824032.28241428:12(2058-2061)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2015

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