Transcript Session 10 - Dakota State University

Chapter 5
Hardware and Software Trends
Introduction
• Four key areas have fueled the advances
in telecommunications and computing
– Semiconductor fabrication
– Magnetic recording
– Networking and communications systems
– Software development
Exponential Growth
• Gordon Moore (a founder of Intel) observed a
trend in semiconductor growth in 1965 that has
held firm for close to 40 years
• Moore’s Law states that the number of
transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every
18 months
• Similar performance curves exist in the
telecommunication and magnetic recording
industries
Semiconductor Technology
• The transistor was invented at Bell Labs in
1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain,
and William Shockley
• Semiconductors form the foundation upon
which much of the modern information
industry is based
• Advances in process have allowed system
designers to pack more performance into
more devices at decreased cost
Trends in Semiconductor
Technology
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Diminishing device size
Increasing density of devices on chips
Faster switching speeds
Expanded function per chip
Increased reliability
Rapidly declining unit cost
Semiconductor Performance
• Electricity (electrons) moves at speeds close to
the speed of light (186k miles/sec)
• As switching elements of a semiconductor get
smaller, they can be placed physically closer
together
• Since the absolute distance between elements
shrinks, device speed increases
• Semiconductor manufacturing cost is more
related to number of chips produced rather than
number of devices per chip
Semiconductor Performance
• As device size shrinks, performance
improves and capability increases (more
logic elements in the same size package
and those elements operate faster)
• During the period from 1960 to 1990
density grew by 7 orders of magnitude
– 3 circuits to 3 million
– By 2020, chips will hold between 1 to 10
billion circuits
Semiconductor Processes
• Semiconductors are produced in
processing plants called fabs
• Fabs produce semiconductors on silicon
wafers
– The wafers are sliced from extremely pure
silicon ingots and polished
– These wafers can range in size from 6 to 12
inches (150 to 300 mm) in diameter
– Newer fabs process larger wafers
Semiconductor Processes
• Current state of the art fabs process 300
mm wafers
• It costs $1.7 billion dollars and takes 30
months to construct and equip a fab
• Fabs are completely obsolete, on average,
in seven years
Semiconductor Processes
• Each wafer holds many identical copies of
the semiconductor
• The wafer moves from process to process
across the fab, slowly being built up to
create the final product
• The last step in the process slices the
wafer up into the individual chips which
are tested and packaged
Semiconductor Processes
• From early in the design of a fab, the number of
wafers the plant can process per month is
determined
• To maximize return on capital investment, the
process engineers attempt to produce the
greatest number of the highest value chips
• Decreasing device size increases both the
number of chips per wafer and the speed of the
devices produced
Semiconductor Processes
• The drive to use larger wafers stems from
the economies of scale
– 2.5 times as many chips can be cut from a
300 mm wafer as compared to a 200 mm
wafer
– 300 mm fabs cost 1.7 times as much as 200
mm ones
Device Geometries
• Device geometry is defined by minimum
feature size
– This is the smallest individual feature created
on the device (line, transistor gate, etc.)
– Current feature size in leading edge fabs is
0.10 microns
– Human hairs are 80 microns in diameter
Roadblocks to Device Shrinkage
• Most common chips are made using the
Complementary Metal Oxide
Semiconductor (CMOS) process
• Chips using CMOS only consume power
when logic states change from 1 to 0 or 0
to 1
• As clock speeds increase the number of
logical operations increases
Roadblocks to Device Shrinkage
• As the minimum feature size decreases,
components are closer together and the
number of components per unit area
increases
• Both these factors increase the amount of
waste heat needed to be removed from a
device
• Effectively removing this heat is a big
challenge
Industry Success
• Success of the semiconductor industry is
driven by huge budgets for scientific
research, process design, and innovation
• Since the semiconductor was invented,
the industry has experienced a growth rate
of 100 times per decade
Industry Innovation
• Increases in device processing power
comes not only from increased clock rates
and decreased device sizes
• Innovation in physical computer
architecture also drives performance
– Bus widths have increased from 8 to 16 to 32
and now are growing to 64-bit wide
– With wider busses, more data can be
transferred from place to place on the chip
simultaneously, increasing performance
Industry Innovation
• Cache Memory – Fast, high speed memory used
to buffer program data near the processor to
avoid data access delays
• Super scalar designs – designs that allow more
than one instruction to be executed at a time
• Hyperthreading – adding a small amount of
extra on-chip hardware that allows one
processor to efficiently act as two, boosting
performance by 25 %
Semiconductor Content
• Microprocessors comprise less than 50%
of total chip production
• Memory, application-specific integrated
circuits (ASICs), and custom silicon make
up the bulk of production
• The telecommunications industry is a huge
driver worldwide as cell phone penetration
increases
Summary
• The invention and innovation of the
semiconductor industry has been
enormously important
• Chip densities will continue to increase
due to innovation in physics, metallurgy,
chemistry, and manufacturing tools and
processes
• Semiconductors will continue to be
cheaper, faster, and more capable
Recording Technologies
• As dramatic as the progress in
semiconductor development is, progress
in recording technologies is even more
rapid
• Disk-based magnetic storage grew at a
compounded rate of 25% through the
1980s but then accelerated to 60% in the
early 1990s and further increased to in
excess of 100% by the turn of the century
Exploding Demand
• As personal computers have grown in
computing power, storage demands have
also accelerated
– Operating systems and common application
suites consume several gigabytes of storage
to start with
– The World Wide Web requires vast amounts
of online storage of information
– Disk storage is being integrated into
consumer electronics
Recording Economics
• At current rates of growth, disk capacities
are doubling every six months
• Growth rates are exceeding Moore’s Law
kinetics by a factor of three
• Price per megabyte has declined from 4
cents in 1998 to 0.07 cent in 2002
Bit Density
• Data density for disk drives is measured in
bits per square inch called areal density
– Current areal density is 70 gigabits per square
inch and is expected to climb to 100 gigabits
per square inch by the end of 2003
– By 2007, areal densities are expected to
exceed 1000 gigabits per square inch
Hard Drive Anatomy
• Data is stored on hard drives in concentric
circles called “Tracks”
• Each track is divided into segments called
“Sectors”
• A drive may contain multiple disks called
“Platters”
• Writing or reading data is done by small
recording heads supported by a mobile
arm
Hard Drive Performance
• Drive performance is commonly measured
by how quickly data can be retrieved and
written
• Two common measures are used
– Seek Time
– Rotational Delay
Hard Drive Performance
• Seek Time is the amount of time it takes
the heads to move from one track to
another
– This time is commonly measured in
milliseconds (ms or thousandths of a second)
– For a processor operating at 1 Ghz, 1 ms is
enough time to execute one million
instructions
– Common seek times of inexpensive drives are
from 7 to 9 ms
Rotational Delay
• The delay imposed by waiting for the
correct sector of data to move under the
read / write heads
– Current drives spin at 7200 RPM.
– Faster rotational speeds decrease rotational
delay
• High end server drives spin at 15000 RPM, with
surface speeds exceeding 100 MPH
• Heads float on a cushion of air 3 millionths of an
inch thick
Other Performance Issues
• Data transfer interfaces are constantly
evolving to keep pace with higher drive
performance.
• New standards include:
– Firewire
– USB 2
– InfiniBand
Fault-Tolerant Storage
• Data has become a strategic asset of most
businesses
• Loss of data can cripple and sometimes
kill an enterprise
• Fault-tolerant storage systems have
become more important as data
availability has become more critical
RAID Storage
• RAID is an acronym that stands for
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives
• RAIDs spread data across multiple drives
to reduce the chance that the failure of
one drive would result in data loss
• RAID levels commonly range from 0 to 5
with some derivative cases
RAID Tradeoffs
• Creating data redundancy creates
transactional overhead and waste of
storage capacity
– RAID 1 is also known as disk mirroring where
every bit on one disk is duplicated on the
mirror
• Every transaction takes two reads or two writes,
and disk space is half of capacity
RAID Tradeoffs
• RAID 5 spreads data across multiple disks
and creates special error-correcting data
• With any drive failure, the lost data can be
reconstructed from the remaining data and
the error-correcting codes
– This has less redundancy than a RAID 1
system, but delivers better throughput
RAID Results
• Mean time before data loss (MTBDL) is a
calculation that attempts to quantify the
reliability of a drive
– A four-disk storage system without RAID has
a MTBDL of 38,600 hours or about once
every four years
– A five-disk RAID 5 system of equal capacity
yields a MTBDL of 48.875 million hours
CD-ROM Storage
• Five inches in diameter, capable of holding
650 MB of data
• So inexpensive, powerful, and widespread
are these disks, that many PC
manufacturers are discontinuing the sale
of 1.44 MB floppy drives in new PCs
• CD-R blanks are now costing
approximately 5 cents each
DVD Storage
• DVDs or Digital Versatile Discs
• Store 4.7 GB of digital data
• Can be used to store video, audio, or
larger data archives
Autonomous Storage Systems
• Computers have traditionally been built
with display, compute, and storage
subsystems in close physical proximity
• With widespread, high speed digital
networks, these components no longer
need to be in the same physical box
• Network Attached Storage and Storage
Area Networks are storage examples of
this trend
Network Attached Storage
• A logical extension of the client/server
model
• NAS boxes are servers not of applications
but of storage
• Data storage can be centralized so that
the disciplines of archiving, security,
availability, and restoration are handled by
computing professionals, not desktop
users
Storage Area Networks
• Commonly referred to as the “network
behind the server”
• Create a unified storage architecture that
supports the storage needs of multiple
servers
• Server to storage links are high-speed
optical connections using network-like
protocols complete with routers and
switches
Benefits of Storage Systems
• Data throughput from a server standpoint
and from a storage standpoint must be
balanced
• Fast servers with slow storage or slow
servers with fast storage do not deliver
optimal performance
• Decoupling storage from computation
allows managers to scale each
independently
Computer Architecture
• Computers include:
– Memory
– Mass storage
– Logic
– Peripherals
– Input devices
– Displays
Supercomputers
• At the extreme edge of the computing
spectrum, supercomputers are clusters of
individual machines lashed together with
high-speed network connections
• The 50 most powerful supercomputers in
existence today are built of no less than 64
processors
• The most powerful are composed of close
to 10,000 individual processors
Supercomputer Performance
• Current benchmarking for supercomputers
is the flop or floating-point operations per
second
• The most powerful supercomputers in the
world easily exceed 1 tera-flops
• The most powerful machine can attain 35
Tflops
Supercomputer Challenges
• Effectively harnessing thousands of CPUs
together is a very complex programming
challenge
• Massively parallel computing operating
systems are difficult to design, optimize,
and troubleshoot
Microcomputers
• The first microcomputer was sold by IBM
in the early 1970s
• With the progress of Moore's Law, PCs
have become more and more powerful
with desktop systems able to deliver in
excess of 2500 MIPS (millions of
instructions per second)
• 10000 MIPS systems will be
commonplace by the end of the decade
Trends in Systems Architecture
• Slowly systems are shifting from being PC
focused to network focused
Client/Server Computing
• With powerful graphical workstations and
high-speed networking, PCs have become
the user interface engine, not the
application
• The most obvious example is the Web
browser. Any number of servers using
numerous different server programs are all
accessible by the same Web client
Thin Clients
• With the “hollowing out of the computer”,
client PCs no longer need to “do it all”
– Storage can be offloaded to SANs or NAS
arrays
– Compute cycles can be located on application
servers across or even external to the
enterprise
Communications Technology
• The same semiconductor and switching
technologies that have driven the
computer revolution have driven the
telecommunications revolution
• Fiber-optic data capacity has increased
even faster than Moore’s Law rates for
semiconductors
• Fiber-optic capacity doubles every six
months
Intranets, Extranets, and the WWW
• Intranet – Network dedicated to internal
corporate use
• Extranet – Network used to bring partners
external to the company into the corporate
network
The World Wide Web
• Invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
• Open standard client/server interface
• Uses open standard HTML for page
formatting and display
• The Web creates a powerful open access
structure that everyone can leverage for
business needs
WWW and Business
• Intranets, extranets, and the Internet all
play parts in creating an e-enabled
business
• Client/server architectures modularize
components allowing special purpose or
custom built systems for online business
Thin Clients
• Called “thin” because they have minimal
local storage, and function primarily as
display devices
• Applications are executed locally but
reside remotely
Benefits of Thin Clients
• Thin clients allow businesses to have a
high degree of control over user’s
desktops
• Central client management eases
troubleshooting and allows rollout of
application upgrades without much
overhead
• Thin clients commonly lack removable
storage so data security is enhanced
Programming Technology
• As opposed to the exponential rate of
growth with the previously discussed
technologies, software has grown at a
linear pace
Operating Systems
• Current examples are
– Microsoft Windows XP
– Linux (Open source)
– Apple OS X
– Free BSD (Open source)
– Solaris (Sun)
– AIX (IBM)
History of Operating Systems
• First programs were called “Monitors”
– They allowed operators to more easily load
programs and retrieve output
• Uniprocessing – executing one program at
a time
• Multiprocessing – appearing to execute
several programs simultaneously by
processing a few instructions from each in
succession
Network Operating Systems
• Operating systems that incorporate
network aware hooks so that systems can
utilize resources seamlessly across the
network infrastructure
• Microsoft’s Windows 2000 and Linux both
incorporate these elements directly out of
the box
Application Programming
• Internet technology requires new tools to
exploit its full potential
– Markup languages such as SGML, HTML,
and XML
– Java is used to code applications that can run
on a broad range of operating systems and
microprocessors
Recapitulation
• The torrent of innovation of the past 30
years will continue
• Technology will open opportunities and
foster innovation that will continue to
change our way of life
• It is as important how we use technology
as it is what technology enables. These
innovations are tools, and carry the same
moral hazards that all tools have
Implications
• Tomorrow’s managers will have
magnitudes greater capability than today’s
• Huge data stores will profile customers,
patients, and employees
• Intranets will begin to break down the
barriers between levels of management,
eliminating distance in time and
bureaucracy
Implications
• Business models are changing with B2B,
B2C, and ASP models becoming rapidly
growing markets
• Information is a strategic asset as well as
a business tool
• With rapid, granular Internet information
strategies, information may be shared
even with competitors if it serves a
business purpose at the time
Summary
• New breakthroughs in information
processing technology will challenge our
ability to harness and integrate these
advances into society, corporations, and
governmental organizations
• Rapid organizational changes will be the
norm
• Failure to embrace change dooms
organizations and their leaders to failure