ICA3PP 2012 Panel on Future and Challenges of Parallel and Distributed Computing

Summary form only given, as follows. Today, both parallel and distributing computing have became ubiquitous in the forms of clouds and cyber physical systems. We have witnessed the fast developing technology fundamentally changing the balances and paradigms between cost of computing, communication and programming: At the hardware level, the essential aspect of quickly changing landscape is the difference in growth of network bandwidth, processor speed and memory access times. High speed networks are changing balance on the networking side, because port throughput is more limited by the processor speed than by the network bandwidth, as it was in the past. At the same time, the latency of the networks is fundamentally limited by the speed of light and the distance that the transferred data need to travel. On the other hand, the speed of a processor is growing faster than the access time to the memory (where the technological advances are used to increase the memory chip capacity rather than its speed). The resulting use of buffering to mask the speed differences has led to the multi-memory hierarchy in which registers, primary cache, secondary cache and main memory are typical layers with progressively lower speed but larger capacity. This panel will discuss the exciting and promising future of parallel and distributed computing. A record of the panel discussion was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings.