Rebooting Computing — The Search for Post-Moore’s Law Breakthroughs

Rebooting Computing — The Search for Post-Moore’s Law Breakthroughs

Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi

Professor High-Performance Computing at George Washington University

IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Speaker

Abstract

The field of high-performance computing (HPC) or supercomputing refers to the building and using computing systems that are orders of magnitude faster than our common systems. The top supercomputer, Summit, can perform 148,600 trillion calculations in one second (148.6 PF on LINPAC). The top two supercomputers are now in the USA followed by two Chinese supercomputers. Many countries are racing to break the record and build an ExaFLOP supercomputer that can perform more than one million trillion (quintillion) calculations per second. In fact, the USA is planning two supercomputers in 2021 one of which, when fully operational (Frontier), will perform at 1.5 EF. Scientists however are concerned that we are reaching many physical limits and we need new innovative ideas to make it to the next generation of computing. This talk will consider where we stand and where we are going with the current state of supercomputing with emphasis on future processors, and some of the ideas that scientists are looking at to re-invent computing. A comparative understanding of Neuromorphic and Brain-Inspired Computing, Quantum Computing, and innovative computing paradigms will be provided along with an assessment of progress so far and the road ahead. Further, I will cover some of our own progress on Nanophotnonic PostMoore’s law processing efforts.

Biography

Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington (GW) University, where he leads the university-wide Strategic Academic Program in High-Performance Computing. He is the founding director of The GW Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and was a founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). Dr. El-Ghazawi’s research interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable and embedded computing, nano-photonic based computing, and computer vision and remote sensing. Dr. El-Ghazawi is also one of the pioneers of the area of High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (HPRC).

Dr. El-Ghazawi was also one of the early researchers in Cluster Computing and has built the first GW cluster in 1995. At present, he is leading efforts for rebooting computing based on new paradigms including analog, nano-photonic, and neuromorphic computing. He has served on many boards and served as a consultant for organizations like CESDIS and RIACS at NASA GSFC and NASA ARC, IBM, and ARSC. He has published over 250 refereed research publications in his area and his work is funded extensively by government organizations like DARPA, NSF, AFOSR, NASA, DoD, and industrial organizations such as Intel, AMD, HP, SGI. Dr. El-Ghazawi has served in many editorial roles and has chaired numerous IEEE international conferences and symposia, including IEEE PGAS 2015, IEEE/ACM CCGrid2018, DSS 2017 to name a few.