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The Computer Journal Advance Access originally published online on April 2, 2009
The Computer Journal 2009 52(6):690-698; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxp013
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Implications of Electronics Technology Trends for Algorithm Design1

Daniel Greenfield* and Simon Moore

Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK

* Corresponding author: daniel.greenfield{at}cl.cam.ac.uk

Received 31 October 2008; revised 5 February 2009

Scaling of electronics technology has brought us to a pivotal point in the design of computational devices. Technology scaling favours transistors over wires which has led us into an era where communication takes more time and consumes more power than the computation itself. This technology driver inevitably pushes us toward a communication-centric approach to algorithm design. To assess the efficiency of an algorithm we will need to be able to predict data movement both in time and space. We demonstrate that algorithms exhibit fractal like communication behaviour which is likely to help with such an analysis. Moreover, successfully exploiting these fractal properties will allow us to reduce communication, thereby increasing performance and power efficiency.

Key Words: CMP • communication complexity • algorithms • fractal structure • temporal interconnect • networks-on-chip • Rent's rule • tera-scale

Handling Editor: Erol Gelenbe

1 A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the BCS08 Visions of Computer Science Conference, held on 22–24 September 2008.


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