Preparing for Supercomputing's Sixth Wave

After five decades of sustained progress, Moore's law appears to be reaching its limits. In order to sustain the dramatic improvements to which we have become accustomed, computing will need to transform to Kurzweil's sixth wave of computing. The supercomputing community will likely need to re-think most of its fundamental technologies and tools, spanning innovative materials and devices, circuits, system architectures, programming systems, system software, and applications. We already see evidence of this transition in the move to new architectures that employ heterogeneous processing, non-volatile memory, multimode memory hierarchies, and optical interconnection networks. In this talk, I will recap progress in these areas over the past three decades, discuss current solutions, and contemplate various future technologies that our community will need for continued progress in supercomputing.