Discipline and Focus: Transcript of interview with Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon

Mohamed Zahran - Heterogeneous Computing: Here to Stay
Mentions of the buzzword heterogeneous computing have been on the rise in the past few years and will continue to be heard for years to come, because heterogeneous computing is here to stay. What is heterogeneous computing, and why is it becoming the norm? How do we deal with it, from both the software side and the hardware side? This article provides answers to some of these questions and presents different points of view on others.

David Chisnall - There’s No Such Thing as a General-purpose Processor
There is an increasing trend in computer architecture to categorize processors and accelerators as "general purpose." Of the papers published at this year’s International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2014), nine out of 45 explicitly referred to general-purpose processors; one additionally referred to general-purpose FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and another referred to general-purpose MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) supercomputers, stretching the definition to the breaking point. This article presents the argument that there is no such thing as a truly general-purpose processor and that the belief in such a device is harmful.

Satnam Singh - Computing without Processors
From the programmer’s perspective the distinction between hardware and software is being blurred. As programmers struggle to meet the performance requirements of today’s systems, they will face an ever increasing need to exploit alternative computing elements such as GPUs (graphics processing units), which are graphics cards subverted for data-parallel computing, and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), or soft hardware.

Dorian Birsan - On Plug-ins and Extensible Architectures
In a world of increasingly complex computing requirements, we as software developers are continually searching for that ultimate, universal architecture that allows us to productively develop high-quality applications. This quest has led to the adoption of many new abstractions and tools. Some of the most promising recent developments are the new pure plug-in architectures. What began as a callback mechanism to extend an application has become the very foundation of applications themselves. Plug-ins are no longer just add-ons to applications; today’s applications are made entirely of plug-ins.