IEEE Rebooting Computing

History

IEEE Future Directions Committee established an "IEEE Rebooting Computing" working group in late 2012 with the broad vision of "rebooting" the entire field of computer technology. The activities of this working group are carried out by the IEEE Rebooting Computing Committee, a team of volunteers from ten participating IEEE Societies and Councils, in conjunction with IEEE Future Directions staff members.

The term "rebooting computing" was coined by IEEE Life Fellow, Peter Denning, as part of an early U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored project focused on revamping computer education.

In order to achieve its goal of rebooting computing, IEEE Rebooting Computing hosted four invitation-only summits between 2013 and 2015 in Washington, D.C., and Santa Cruz, California. These summits addressed the future of computing from a holistic point of view.

In 2014, IEEE Rebooting Computing adopted its new logo, consisting of an exploding infinity symbol. The logo is intended to suggest the absence of limits for future computing technology.

IEEE Rebooting Computing announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) in March 2015. Under the MOU's terms, both organizations agreed to work collaboratively through mutual representation, as well as joint activities including publications, events, educational materials, and more.

In September 2015, IEEE Rebooting Computing announced support for the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). Established under Executive Order 13072 issued by U.S. President Barack Obama in July 2015, the NSCI calls for a coordinated Federal strategy in high-performance computing (HPC) research, development, and deployment.

In October 2015, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), an interagency program of the U.S. government, announced a “Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge in Future Computing”. A key document cited by NNI as part of this grand challenge is a white paper, co-sponsored by IEEE Rebooting Computing and ITRS, entitled Sensible Machines.

Purpose

IEEE Rebooting Computing aims to help return the computing industry to exponential computer-performance scaling, which stalled in 2005 due to energy inefficiencies of CMOS-based classical computers. Historically, computer processing power doubled every 18 months due to increasing densities of transistors per semiconductor unit. To alleviate challenges brought on by limitations in computer architectures and sustain regular processing performance gains, there was a move toward instruction-level parallelism and superscalar microprocessors. However, with rising costs associated with greater power consumption brought on by this approach signaling the end of Moore's Law, IEEE introduced the IEEE Rebooting Computing initiative.

Incorporating three fundamental pillars of rebooting computing, including energy efficiency, security, and Human Computer Interface (HCI), the initiative seeks to overcome setbacks and challenges relating to the deceleration of computational power and capacity. In turn, these efforts may also be applied in other technology sectors, such as the Internet of Things.

Current work

With the goal of identifying new directions in computing and aiding industry in returning to historical exponential scaling of computer performance, IEEE Rebooting Computing encompasses a variety of activities, products, and services. Among these efforts are an online web portal, technical community, publications, conferences, and events. IEEE Rebooting Computing also maintains a collaborative partnership with ITRS, as well as responding to and participating in national and international initiatives, the NSCI and the "Nanotechnology Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing".

IEEE Rebooting Computing Web Portal

The web portal is the primary online home for IEEE Rebooting Computing. The website provides relevant news, information, and resources to users, such as articles authored by IEEE experts and third-party publications. It also includes access to a list of both IEEE-sponsored and general industry conferences and events, videos, and historical data from IEEE Rebooting Computing's past summits.

IEEE Rebooting Computing Technical Community

IEEE Technical Communities are virtual communities for practitioners, subject matter experts, researchers, and other technology professionals interested in specific topic areas. Open to any interested individual, the IEEE Rebooting Computing Technical Community serves as a venue for the distribution and dissemination of news, announcements, and other information from those societies and councils taking part in the IEEE Rebooting Computing initiatiive. IEEE membership is not required to become a member of the IEEE Rebooting Computing Technical Community.

IEEE Rebooting Computing conferences and events

IEEE Rebooting Computing sponsors, co-sponsors, and takes part in a variety of technology conferences and events worldwide. Conference and event programming is designed to stimulate discussion of existing and emerging technologies, including challenges, benefits, and opportunities. Typically lasting anywhere from a single day to a week or more, conference and event programming generally encompasses keynote addresses, panel discussions, paper presentations, poster sessions, tutorials, and workshops in one or more tracks.

IEEE Rebooting Computing Summits

The initiative's flagship event series is its Rebooting Computing Summits. The inaugural IEEE Rebooting Computing Summit was held in December 2013 in Washington, D.C. The event drew business and industry, government, and academic representatives both from the U.S. and internationally for a variety of plenary lectures and brainstorming sessions.

Based on the first event, a second IEEE Rebooting Computing Summit was held in May 2014 in Santa Cruz, California. Following a similar format to the first summit, a group of invited business and trade, academia, and government experts took part in discussing neuromorphic engineering, approximate computing, and adiabatic / reversible computing.

With the first two summits serving as the event's basis, IEEE Rebooting Computing held a third summit in October 2014, in Scotts Valley, California. The theme for the third summit was "Rethinking Structures of Computation", and focused on the topics of parallel computing, security, approximation, and Human-Computer Interaction. As part of the event, attendees took part in plenary talks, a poster session, and heard details of a new government initiative in future computing research.

A fourth IEEE Rebooting Computing Summit (RCS4), with a theme of "Roadmapping the Future of Computing: Discovering How We May Compute" was held in December 2015, in Washington D.C. The event included plenary talks and breakout groups in the three tracks of "Probabilistic/Approximate Computing", "Neuromorphic Computing", and "Beyond CMOS/3D Computing", with a fourth track on "Superconducting Computing". The summit also hosted speakers from other programs promoting future computing, both governmental and industrial, including DARPA, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), ITRS, NSCI, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Semiconductor Research Corporation.

A larger, open conference, the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC 2016), is scheduled for October 2016, in San Diego, California. The goal of ICRC 2016 is to discover and foster novel methodologies to reinvent computing technology, including new materials and physics, devices and circuits, system and network architectures, and algorithms and software. Proceedings of the event will be published by IEEE.

Low-Power Image Recognition Challenges

In June 2015, IEEE Rebooting Computing held the first-ever Low-Power Image Recognition Competition (LPIRC). Held as a one-day workshop as during the 2015 Design Automation Conference in San Francisco, California, the competition aimed to assess the state of low-power approaches to object detection in images. The competition fielded competitors from four different countries and included teams from Carnegie Mellon, Rice University, and Tsinghua University and Huawei.

Before the competition, training data was released for detection from the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). Source code of the referee system was released to the public in March 2015. For the competition, an intranet was established for the contestants to retrieve provided image files from and return answers to the competition's referee system. Teams were given 10 minutes to process images, which were ranked by detection accuracy and energy usage.

A second LPIRC was held during the June 2016 Design Automation Conference in Austin, Texas.

Publications

As part of the initiative's work, IEEE Rebooting Computing members and societies regularly publish papers, manuscripts, journals and magazines, and other documents. Among the various IEEE publications IEEE Rebooting Computing contributes to or features articles from on its web portal are Computer Magazine; IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems; IEEE Journal on Exploratory Solid-State Computational Devices and Circuits; IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine; IEEE Spectrum; and Proceedings of the IEEE.

In December 2015, Computer Magazine published a special issue on rebooting computing, with members of the IEEE Rebooting Committee as guest editors and contributors.

IEEE Rebooting Computing also contributes to a variety of trade publications and news outlets, such as EE Times and Scientific Computing.

Participating IEEE societies

IEEE Rebooting Computing has multi-society participation from a cross-section of IEEE societies with interest in numerous aspects of computing, including circuits and systems design; architectures; design automation; magnetics; nanotechnology; reliability; and superconductors.

IEEE Societies and Councils taking part in the IEEE Rebooting Computing initiative are:

Collaboration with ITRS

IEEE Rebooting Computing has established a collaborative relationship with the ITRS. The two organizations initiated an exchange of information in 2014. Following the signing of a formal collaboration agreement, IEEE Rebooting Computing and ITRS arranged and held joint international workshops in 2015 with the objective of identifying computer performance scaling challenges and establishing a roadmap to successfully restart computer performance scaling. IEEE Rebooting Computing further collaborated with ITRS on a new effort, known as ITRS 2.0, that extends beyond traditional Moore's Law scaling of chips to include roadmaps covering systems and applications.

ITRS Chairman Paolo Gargini said, "The ITRS shares IEEE Rebooting Computing’s mission to restore computing to its historic exponential performance scaling trends so our society and future societies can benefit. Our agreement will ensure we help fundamentally shift the computer industry’s focus, resources, time and attention on to new possibilities for computational performance."

On May 4, 2016, IEEE announced the launch of the "International Roadmap for Devices and Systems" (IRDS), operating as part of the IEEE Standards Association's (IEEE-SA) Industry Connections program. IRDS is sponsored by IEEE Rebooting Computing in consultation with the IEEE Computer Society and ITRS. IRDS will provide guidance on future trends in computer systems, architectures, software, chips, and other components across the entire computer industry, and is modeled on ITRS roadmaps that have previously guided the semiconductor industry during the Moore’s Law era.

Influence and impact

Through its summits, other educational efforts, and engagement with government, IEEE Rebooting Computing initiative has begun to influence both the technology industry and national policy efforts. The initiative plans to extend this current sphere of influence by creating and releasing the IRDS Roadmap of Future Computing. This proposed roadmap will include development of performance benchmarks and standards for new classes of computer systems.

Addressing roadblocks in future high-performance computing, also known as exascale computing, is a key area of focus for IEEE Rebooting Computing. The initiative has been actively pursuing and aiding the industry in making progress toward possible solutions such as specialized chip architectures, millivolt switches, and 3D integrated circuits, as noted by Dr. Erik DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories in "Power Problems Threaten to Strangle Exascale Computing".

In February 2015, IEEE Rebooting Computing Senior Program Director Bichlien Hoang and co-author Sin-Kuen Hawkins were received a "Best Presentation Award" for their paper, "How Will Rebooting Computing Help IoT". Presented at the 18th International Conference on Intelligence in Next Generation Networks (ICIN 2015) in Paris, France, the paper described IEEE Rebooting Computing's approach to addressing technical challenges generated by IoT other key computing trends.

Media coverage

Media coverage of IEEE Rebooting Commputing's efforts has increased. In May 2016, a New York Times feature article on the technological and economic implications of the ending of Moore’s Law quoted IEEE Rebooting Chair, Professor Thomas M. Conte of the Georgia Institute of Technology as saying, “The end of Moore’s Law is what led to this. Just relying on the semiconductor industry is no longer enough. We have to shift and punch through some walls and break through some barriers.”

Among other publications reporting on IEEE Rebooting Computing activities are EE Times; HPCWire; IEEE Spectrum; Inside HPC; Scientific Computing; SiliconANGLE; and VR World.