2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Our Computational Foundation Crisis and Life Beyond

The Future of Computing In the recent Department of Energy workshop report Architectures and Technology for Extreme Scale Computing, the following summary statements were made: The challenges and projected trends "…will make it increasingly difficult for a broad range of computational scientists to use the most powerful computing systems. This suggests that computational scientists and computer architects must sit down together to understand the complete range of trade-offs possible for each of them and then co-design their codes and systems to maximize scientific throughput." This dramatic statement represents a very real crisis that has been building for the last decade with still no clear solution. This session includes a history of how computers were created and for what purposes, technical challenges that define the crisis being faced, and visions of the possibilities that lie ahead. A critical part of this session will be an open panel involving frank dialogue between speakers and the scientific and computer community represented in the audience. Beyond educating the audience about the crisis and opening this critical dialogue, the session aims to draft a list of category designations that could describe the full range of problems projected to be faced in the future and to accelerate discussion and responsive activities.