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KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Reiner
Hartenstein, Professor,
TU
Kaiserslautern
With respect to the future
affordability of our entire computing
ecosystem, Reiner Hartenstein will address 3 different key issues.
Faster than predicted years ago, we see the impact of climate change. A
key factor seems to be carbon emission, primarily from power plants, so
that we should reduce the number of plants required.
Another important issue is the high cost of energy. A study [Mark. P.
Mills] estimates that almost 30% of all electricity consumed in the US
goes into all kinds of computers, visible or embedded, and might go up
to 50% some years later. The upward trend of the crude oil price
(having reached 164 dollars by July 2008) reminds us, that the
operating cost of our
entire computing ecosystem might become unaffordable within a few
years: another reason for trying to reduce the number of power plants
needed.
Again another important issue is the strategic change of
the microprocessor industry by stopping the GHz race, kicking off the
many-core programming crisis which threatens to stall further progress
to affordable higher performance computing: „from growth industry to
replacement industry“, [Dave Patterson]: „Methods for supporting
many-core could reset microprocessor hardware and software roadmaps for
the next 30 years.”
A fully von-Neumann-based approach can
never be the solution to cope with the many-core programming crisis,
nor
with the growing energy cost. Low Power IC design techniques will play
a role in this situation. However, methods to cope with the von Neumann
syndrome by software to configware migration promise a drastically
better reduction in power consumption and promise speed-ups to
drastically higher performance – both promises by up to
several orders of magnitude.
Because of the enormous burden by legacy software, we cannot fully
switch quickly to a disruptive
paradigm shift. We need a twin paradigm approach, based on computing
wisdom mostly having been ignored by our curricula for decades
- except by the scenes of Reconfigurable Computing offering the highly
promising twin brother of the von Neumann paradigm.
The
talk illustrates, why this approach
has a drastically higher potential to solve the problems mentioned
above, and proposes related models to cope with our CS
education dilemma. This whistle blowing talk calls for a run-away
computing revolution causing a quick and strong educational impact as
known from the VLSI design revolution a la Mead & Conway. We all
must stick together to avoid a disaster of historic dimensions.

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Reiner Hartenstein received all his
academic degrees from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, his diploma in 1959 and his
Dr.-Ing. degree in 1969.
He is professor at TU
Kaiserslautern
and was visiting professor at UC Berkeley. He is consultant and
authorized expert and referee on
on Reconfigurable high Performance Computing. In research he
is credited to be the father of HPC Reconfigurable Computing.
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Hartenstein
is pioneer of structured VLSI design and author of the hardware
language
KARL, the trailblazer of VHDL and Verilog. He is founder of three, and
co-founder of two more successful international conference series, as
well as founder of the Multi University VLSI Design „E.I.S. Projekt“,
the German contribution to the Mead-&-Conway VLSI design
revolution.
He is IEEE life fellow,
SDPS fellow, FPL fellow, and recipient of
several other awards He has published 14 books and more than 400
technical papers and has given numerous talks, including more than 200
invited talks and more than 20 keynote addresses.
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