Not faster nor slower tasks, but less energy hungry and parallel: Simulation results

摘要

Before the current computational era, when the most common processors had a single processing core, the speed of computation was mainly defined by the speed of that core. Faster cores usually reflected in faster algorithms and applications. In the current era, the speed of computation is no longer primarily boosted by faster cores. Due to the thermal effect known as the power wall, the increment in speed that can be reached from one processor generation to another is very limited. The power wall is not the only limiting factor though. The degree of instruction level parallelism has also reached far in the law of diminishing returns. Today's era is governed by multi-core processors. The power wall was circumvented with task level parallelism. The downside is that many applications may not effortlessly become faster with new generations of processors. In the multi-core era, faster algorithms are obtained with a combination of more processing cores and a good exploration of task level parallelism, meaning that algorithm designers have now an active roll in sustaining the performance of their application through generations of processors.