Turing Lecture: A Not So Simple Matter of Software

By Jack J. Dongarra. 2025

For nearly forty years, Moore's Law produced exponential growth in hardware performance, and during that same time, most software failed to keep pace with these hardware advances. We will look at some of the algorithmic and software changes that have tried to keep up with the advances in the hardware. In this talk, we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 40-years and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a significant impact on our numerical scientific software. A new generation of software libraries and algorithms are needed to effectively use the high performance computing environments in use today.

Citations in the corpus

• The case for 4-bit precision: k-bit Inference Scaling Laws (2022, neutral): “For example, for modern hardware like GPUs, it usually takes more than 100 times longer to load a number than to do an arithmetic operation with that number (Jia et al., 2019; Dongarra, 2022).”