"Defining Computer 'Speed': An Unsolved Challenge"

<!--HTML--><p style="text-align: justify"> <strong>Abstract:</strong><br /> <br /> The reason we use computers is their speed, and the reason we use parallel computers is that they&#39;re faster than single-processor computers. Yet, after 70 years of electronic digital computing, we still do not have a solid definition of what computer &#39;speed&#39; means, or even what it means to be &#39;faster&#39;. Unlike measures in physics, where the definition of speed is rigorous and unequivocal, in computing there is no definition of speed that is universally accepted. As a result, computer customers have made purchases misguided by dubious information, computer designers have optimized their designs for the wrong goals, and computer programmers have chosen methods that optimize the wrong things.<br /> This talk describes why some of the obvious and historical ways of defining &#39;speed&#39; haven&#39;t served us well, and the things we&#39;ve learned in the struggle to find a definition that works.<br /> <br /> <br /> <strong>Biography:</strong><br /> <br /> Dr. John Gustafson is a Director at Intel Labs in Santa Clara, California. John is well known in High Performance Computing, having introduced the first commercial cluster system in 1985&nbsp; and having first demonstrated 1000x scalable parallel performance on real applications in 1988, for which he won the inaugural Gordon Bell Award. That demonstration created a watershed that led to the widespread manufacture and use of highly parallel computers. It also led to a counter-argument to Amdahl&#39;s law called Gustafson&#39;s law, that some now refer to as &quot;weak scaling&quot;. He received the IEEE Computer Society&#39;s Golden Core Award in 2007. His decisions in computer design are informed by his experience as a high performance computing user while at Ames Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> &nbsp;</p>