CTO Articles
Published in IT World
May 22, 2007
Moore's Law and batteries
I recently read a fascinating report about the imminent future of computing written from a hardware perspective. "The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley"[1] paints a landscape liberally dotted with single chips that have 1,000 separate CPUs on them. If you are in the software side of the IT business, the mind initially boggles and then melts. How in the world will we manage to program these things to make use of all that CPU power?
In the not too distant future, every software developer is going to have the equivalent of a massive computing Grid under his fingers. The scary thing for the software folk is that the single CPU performance of these things will not be much better than today's machines. Without a way of using all the CPUs in parallel, hardware-derived speedups of software systems will not materialize. The days of passively waiting for better hardware to make your software go faster without doing any work are coming to an end my friends.
Also recently, I had cause to stand, cheek by jowl, with a Colossus. Namely, a rebuilt version of the World War 2 code breaking computer at Bletchley Park in the UK[2]. The size of the thing compared to the infinitely more powerful laptop I had slung over my shoulder created a notable juxtaposition.
The shrinkage over the years of the processing/memory components the world uses has been quite incredible. However, the shrinkage of the power supply mechanisms has been significantly less so. Batteries, as has often been noted, do not obey Moore's Law[3]. This is nothing short of a tragedy for the human race. I know that sounds theatrical but I do not think it is overstating the case. If Moore's Law did apply to batteries we could all probably be driving electric cars, to take just one example.
Leaving that train of thought to one side, the battery problem is getting worse as the CPU count climbs inexorably upwards. CPUs are power hungry things. How will your laptop battery cope with the 1,000 CPUs? Not very well probably. We have a bad combination of circumstances. We need to feed power to drive the CPUs. That power needs to come from somewhere. Doing so generates heat. We then need to dissipate the heat by powering fans. That power needs to come from somewhere.
I have an image of Captain Kirk shouting "We need more power" and Scotty, roasting his loins on the battery pack, shouting back "the batteries cannot take it Sir!".
Standing next to Collusus one naturally thinks of Alan Turing who worked at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Images of other history-changing figures in the history of computing naturally follow. From Babbage to Bill Shockely.
Wanted: one genius to solve the battery problem. Immediate start. Fame and fortune guaranteed. No qualifications necessary.
[1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
[3] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/start.html?pg=2