现代PC之父Charles P. Thacker - 2009年Turing奖演讲

Improving the future by examining the past

 

1. New system will require changes in the way we program them.
2. Today, we can store every bit of information we receive during a lifetime on a few disks.
3. Moore’s law … is often misunderstood…
4. No two points on earth are more than 50ms apart. Bandwidth is no longer scarece.

 

 

In designing future systems, we should examine some of the decisions made in the past. Some choices we made may be less relevant, and paths not taken might be more appropriate today.

1. virtual memory
2. memory coherence (vs message passing)
3. threads and locks
4. Complex CPUs
5. Interrupts
6. Packet-switched networks (for data center, is circuit switching is more suitable? )

 

We should rethink earlier design decisions based on new realities.

 

Computers still can’t do a lot of things, so we still have challenges:
–Drive my car
–Learn my preferences, and be a colleague rather than a slave
–Help educate my grandchildren.
–Enhance my privacy, rather than eroding it.