Following the end of Dennard scaling and the transition to multicore we are now seeing an evolution to communication-centric architectures and systems. Data movement is more expensive in time and energy than compute, and as a consequence systems are undergoing another fundamental transformation to optimize data movement rather than compute. This transformation will percolate up through the software stacks and to clusters and data centers. This trend has been amplified with the emergence of big data as a major challenge for future systems. This talk will make some observations about the impact of technology trends on cluster architectures and offer some opinions on anticipated research problems. It will conclude with a description of our new project, Oncilla, an experimental platform where we explore data movement optimizations for data warehousing applications in context of clusters that are architected to offer flexible compositions of heterogeneous compute and memory resources.

Keynote: Scalable Resource Composition in a Flat World [PDF]