Most commodity flash disks exhibit very poor performance when presented with writes that are not sequentially ordered. We argue that performance can be significantly improved through the addition of sufficient RAM to hold data structures describing a fine-grain mapping between disk logical blocks and physical flash addresses. We present a design that accomplishes this.

Between 1972 and 1980, the first distributed personal computing system was built at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The system was composed of a number of Alto workstations connected by an Ethernet local network. It also included servers that provided centralized facilities. This paper describes the development of the hardware that was the basis of the system.

Although transistor densities continue to scale exponentially, the failure of Dennard Scaling prevents us from maximally utilizing die area in future power-constrained multicore processors-a phenomenon referred to as "Dark Silicon". Alternative energy-efficient architectures based on FPGAs, GPGPUs, ASICs, MPPAs, etc. are likely to continue on an exponential scaling trajectory while outperforming conventional architectures by an order-of-magnitude or more. With the impending threat of dark silicon, there is a critical window of opportunity for reconfigurable computing to become a mainstream ingredient and driver of future, scalable computer architectures. Before this can happen, major challenges and opportunities must be addressed: (1) how to gracefully integrate reconfigurable computing into existing software and hardware ecosystems, (2) how to build tools, languages, and compilers for agile application development and debugging, (3) how to identify and exploit emerging applications in datacenters and in energy-constrained form factors, (4) how to train and educate students and practitioners to use these systems in sustainable ways, and (5) how to define new and stable boundaries between software and hardware that make it easier to exploit reconfigurable computing. This panel brings together pioneers and experts in computer architecture and reconfigurable computing to discuss opportunities and challenges in the wake of dark silicon.xvi

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