SOFSEM 2001 28th Annual Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics November 24 - December 1, 2001 Piestany, Slovak Republic, Europe

Prospects for concurrency theory: How to use a trillion transistors?

by Vaughan Pratt

Within this decade, 4" semiconductor wafers will hold a trillion (10^12) transistors. In the absence of any rational strategy to date for putting that many transistors to effective use, it can't hurt to indulge in the meantime in a few irrational strategies. Computer architects and concurrency theorists need to start getting on each other's wavelength. And both need to recognize that the natural logic of concurrency is linear, with plus and tensor product playing a foundational role in its software.