Abstract

The two major architectures in use today were both designed for personal computers. But now, personal computers are disappearing. In their place is a rapidly growing Internet of Things interfacing to a Cloud of massively parallel computing systems – along with an emerging new species – Robots, or ‘cyber-physical-systems’.

Clouds need energy-efficient computers; they account for a rapidly increasing proportion of world-wide energy consumption. They will also need to support a diverse range of applications using thousands of processors in both data intensive and high-performance computing. ‘Things’ need low-power processing along with real-time interfaces to the physical world. Robots need everything – efficient systems that combine real-time interfacing with embedded concurrent computing for control and intelligence.

I will explore the limitations of our current architectures in these new systems and the problems they create for software – tools and applications. I will suggest some innovations that could overcome these limitations both in new architectures or in modifications to the existing ones. Some of these ‘innovations’ date from the 1980s!