Dr. David Andrews of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Arkansas presented a colloquium speech to students and faculty of the department on October 22. His talk was titled “It’s Not Your Father’s Computer”. His talk began by observing the contradiction we face that while our use of computers has changed dramatically over the past few decades, the technology base for computing systems has resisted change. On one end are large numbers of sensor rich and networked IoT devices. At the other end of the spectrum are big power-hungry data center and warehouse scale computer systems. Further, the driving applications we run on these systems no longer simply crunch numbers and return a result. In the remainder of the talk he focused on the reasons he believes our old computing approaches will not suffice in this new era. He then outlined what he believes are critical new research challenges that need to be addressed to support the new driving applications in the area of IoT and embedded systems.
Following a lunch reception for Dr. Andrews and the department community, a second meeting was then held where he presented his most recent personal research on parallel computing systems incorporating FPGAs and the use of hardware-based operating system mechanisms for interprocess communication and synchronization (the Hthreads system).