Implications of Electronics Technology Trends for Algorithm Design

Abstract

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.