Fun Stuff for CS7600 (Intensive Computer Systems)

Computer systems is an exciting area today, because it is constantly changing. Here are some of the resources on the web that I have enjoyed.

Current Events

NEWS (for Spring, 2016 and earlier):
New memory technology: 3D XPoint (Intel/Micron, from press release)
(non-volatile memory (like Flash/SSD), but 1,000 times faster and byte-addressable; at a price between Flash and RAM ??; to be available in 2016)
Details:

Intel video about 3D XPoint on YouTube (heavy marketing slant)
Technical overview from Micron
Intel Announces Optane Storage Brand for 3D XPoint Products (available in 2016 as SSD (PCIe) and as DIMM (replacement for DRAM chips); 5x faster than standard SSD)
History of memory technologies (Intel marketing)
Analysis by techeye.net
3D XPoint (Wikipedia)
3D XPoint memory stumbles in race to ditch DRAM; RRAM may step up (a more critical analysis)

SPECULATION ABOUT FUTURE CHIPS:

NEWS (9/30/16): Innovation to keep Moore's Law alive, says TSMC co-CEO (Over 300 engineers involved in R&D for 3 nm process: approximately 8 to 15 silicon atoms across)
NEWS (9/20/16): Nichia, Taiwan LED chips makers to start UV-C LED production (UV-C: See subdivisions of the electromagnetic spectrum.)
NEWS (9/19/16): Globalfoundries unveils plan for 7nm FinFET manufacturing (7 nm is approximately 18 or 35 silicon atoms laid end-to-end.)
NEWS (4/25/16): Competition in advanced process technologies market to heat up (from digitimes.com) (10 nm is approximately 25 or 50 silicon atoms laid end-to-end.)
NEWS (4/6/16): Samsung now producing 10 nm RAM chips: (from digitimes.com) (10 nm is approximately 25 or 50 silicon atoms laid end-to-end.)
NEWS (2/16/15): Samsung announces mass production of 14nm FinFET mobile chips (Samsung 8-core smartphones to be faster and lower power) (from digitimes.com)
A semi-recent article: the future of CPUs for smartphones, and the issue of power: Page 1 of Part 2
I also liked: Page 2 of part 1, talking about the race between Intel, and some fabrication foundries (manufacturing the designs of other companies) such as TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung. They all want to fabricate with the smallest line-width. Intel and others are working to develop a 10 nm process for the next generation: 10 nm is approximately 25 or 50 silicon atoms laid end-to-end (depending on which measure of the silicon radius is used).
Motivation for multi-core CPUs: Limits of CPU Power Trends at beginning of the millenium (from here)

OLDER NEWS from Spring, 2015:
NEWS: Talk by Yale Patt (famous researcher in Computer Architecture)
NEWS: 2015 CCIS Colloquia (research talks by invited guests to CCIS: topics including security, big data, social networks, robotics, natural language, etc.)
NEWS: Android Apps that Never Die (talk by me, Gene Cooperman, and Rohan Garg, at ACM undergrad chapter: 6 p.m., Wed., Feb. 25, 104 WVG) (pizza included)
NEWS: One VLSI fabrication facility: $6.2 billion as of 2014 (from digitimes.com): UMC to build 12-inch fab in Xiamen

What are the largest supercomputers today?

TOP500 Supercomputer Sites
- Lists of Top 500 supercomputers in the world, with Top 10 on first page.
- Some recent blogs from the TOP500 site:
  - Translating HPC Speak (an irreverent view of High Performance Computing)
  - What is the use of quantum computing without pictures or conversations? (What to do after Moore's Law ends?)
  - How To Kill A Supercomputer: Dirty Power, Cosmic Rays, and Bad Solder

NEWS:

Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi For Deep Learning (see also Coral supercomputers, below)

Deep Learning on NVIDIA GPUs

DeepMind Beats Human Champion at Game of Go (in 2015)

"[The deep learning algorithm of] AlphaGo doesn't actually use that much hardware in play, but we needed a lot of hardware to train it and do all the different versions and have them play each other in tournaments on the cloud. That takes quite a lot of hardware to do efficiently, so we couldn't have done it in this time frame without those resources."

NEWS: Coral supercomputers (appearing from 2016--2018; see especially the table, lower down in this article)

What are some popular programming languages today?

Relative Popularity of Different Languages

TIOBE index (updated monthly)

Benchmark Games (Which is faster, C, Java, or Python?):
(Benchmarks are notoriously variable. Be careful about how you interpret this.)

Three Newer Languages (with lessons from Scheme/Java/C/C++)

Go (widely used at Google; also the source language for Docker, a new type of lightweight virtual machine built on top of Linux containers)
Rust (grew out of Mozilla, the developer of Firefox; may be used for a future version of Firefox)
Scala (runs on JVM; Spark, a proposed successor to Hadoop, is built using Scala, and supports Scala, Java, and Python)

A Brief Glimpse at Some Other Assembly Languages