Innovations in computing systems are essential to countering European societal challenges
The EU faces severe societal challenges in the fields of transportation and mobility, healthcare, demographic evolution, energy and environment, productivity, safety and security, and education. Innovations in computing systems are an essential ingredient to help Europe to cope with the societal challenges (smart houses, smart cities, grids, things, …), because computing systems have by now become the cornerstone of our civilization and are a part of just about everything that surrounds us. Koen De Bosschere, professor at Ghent University and coordinator of the HiPEAC network of excellence, today explains at the Architecture of Computing Systems conference (ARCS 2012), how computing systems are very powerful tools for taking on Europe’s societal challenges, and he outlines HiPEAC’s research vision to ascertain Europe’s position and global competitiveness in such systems. In this report, HiPEAC leverages the broad expertise of its 1000+ researchers from European universities and companies, to identify and analyze the key challenges for computing systems in Europe over the next decade. The report provides one of the key inputs for the planning of the EU research investments. While advances in computing systems have been consistent and dramatic over the past fifty years, their future today is not as certain, explain Koen De Bosschere. “To continue to be a source for new and innovative solutions, the computing systems community must dramatically improve the efficiency, complexity, and dependability of the future computing systems”, he added. Emerging trends Clear trends are emerging, the HiPEAC report says: an unseen data explosion in all domains (much faster than the explosion in computing power), an increased demand for connectivity and for dependable and reliable systems across all fields. From a technology point of view, it is getting increasingly more difficult to convert the increasing transistor density (Moore’s law) into similar performance improvements needed to facilitate new innovative solutions. There is a fast growing gap between the raw performance of hardware devices, and the actual performance resulting from the use of common tools and practices. Possible solutions For the short and medium term, HiPEAC report concludes that specializing computing devices is the most promising but difficult path for dramatically improving the performance of future computing systems. In this light, HiPEAC has identified seven concrete research objectives related to the design and the exploitation of specialized heterogeneous systems for the data deluge and for reliable ubiquitous computing. A major challenge is to provide tools to automatically exploit and optimize the resources of such heterogeneous computing devices. In the longer term, the HiPEAC vision states that it will become critical to investigate research directions breaking with the line of classical systems and the traditional hardware/software boundary. This includes new devices and new computing paradigms, such as bio-inspired systems, stochastic computing, swarm computing, etc. European opportunity By addressing the seven specific research objectives and by investigating emerging technologies, Europe can continue to benefit from the promised growth of computing systems technology, concludes the HiPEAC report. Failure to address these challenges will significantly reduce European ability to leverage computing systems’ potential to improve global competitiveness and tackle society’s challenges, HiPEAC warns.
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Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom