A Roadmap To Post-Moore Era for Distributed Systems

Vincenzo De Maio, Atakan Aral, Ivona Brandic

Abstract: We are reaching the limits of the von Neumann computing architectures (also called Moore's law era) as there is no free ride of the performance growth from simply shrinking the transistor features. As one of the consequences, we experience the rise of highly specialized architectures ranging from neuromorphic to quantum computing, exploiting completely different physical phenomena and demanding the development of entirely new architectures - that, however, can perform the computations within a fraction of the energy needed by the von Neumann architecture. Thus, we experience the paradigm shift from generalized architectures of the Von Neumann era to highly specialized architectures in the Post-Moore era where we expect the coexistence of multiple types of architectures specialized for different types of computation. In this paper, we discuss the implications of the post-Moore era for distributed systems.