DataPacRat comments on Open Thread, Apr. 27 - May 3, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 27 April 2015 12:18AM

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Comment author: DataPacRat 30 April 2015 08:08:40PM 3 points [-]

Seeking Moore's Law extrapolations

I once found some charts showing a few close variants of Moore's Law, such as MIPS per dollar per year; but I seem to have lost them. Does anyone have some references handy, which I can mine for some SFnal worldbuilding? (Eg, how big and costly a device storing 100 petabytes would be in a given year.)

Comment author: jacob_cannell 30 April 2015 09:53:32PM *  10 points [-]

I've done some rather extensive investigations into the physical limits of computation and the future of Moore's Law style progress. Here's the general lowdown/predictions:

Moore's law for conventional computers is just running into some key new asymptotic limits. The big constraint is energy, which is entirely dominated now by interconnect (and to a lesser degree, passive leakage). For example, on a modern GPU it costs only about 10pJ for a flop, but it costs 30pJ just to read a float from a register, and it gows up orders of magnitude to read a float from local cache, remote cache, off-chip RAM, etc. The second constraint is the economics of shrinkage. We may already be hitting a wall around 20nm to 28nm. We can continue to make transistors smaller, but the cost per transistor is not going down so much (this effects logic transistors more than memory).

3D is the next big thing that can reduce interconnect distances, and using that plus optics for longer distances we can probably squeeze out another 10x to 30x improvement in ops/J. Nvidia and Intel are both going to use 3D RAM and optics in their next HPC parts. At that point we are getting close to the brain in terms of a limit of around 10^12 flops/J, which is a sort of natural limit for conventional computing. Low precision ops don't actually help much unless we are willing to run at much lower clockrates, because the energy cost comes from moving data (lower clock rates reduce latency pressure which reduces register/interconnect pressure). Alternate materials (graphene etc) are a red herring and not anywhere near as important as the interconnect issue, which is completely dominate at this point.

The next big improvement would be transitioning to a superconducting circuit basis which in theory allows for moving bits across the interconnect fabric for zero energy cost. That appears to be decades away, and it would probably only make sense for cloud/supercomputer deployment where large scale cryocooling is feasible. That could get us up to 10^14 flops/J, and up to 10^18 ops/J for low precision analog ops. This tech could beat the brain in terms of energy efficiency by a factor of about 100x to 1000x or so. At that point you are at the Landauer limit.

The next steps past that will probably involve reversible computing and quantum computing. Reversible computing can reduce the energy of some types of operations arbitrarily close to zero. Quantum computing can allow for huge speedups for some specific algorithms and computations. Both of these techs appear to also require cryocooling (as reversible computing without a superconducting interconnect just doesn't make much sense, and QC coherence works best near absolute zero). It is difficult to translate those concepts into a hard speedup figure, but it could eventually be very large - on the order of 10^6 or more.

For information storage density, DNA is close to the molecular packing limit of around ~1 bit / nm^3. A typical hard drive has a volume of around 30 cm^3, so using DNA level tech would result in roughly 10^21 bytes for an ultimate hard drive - so say 10^20 bytes to give room for the non-storage elements.

Comment author: TylerJay 04 May 2015 11:11:46PM 0 points [-]

Very informative. Thanks. I've heard reversible computing mentioned a few times, but have never looked into it. Any recommendations for a quick primer, or is wikipedia going to be good enough?

Comment author: jacob_cannell 05 May 2015 07:40:38PM 1 point [-]

The info on wikipedia is ok. This MIRI interview with Mike Frank provides a good high level overview. Frank's various publications go into more details. "Physical Limits of Computing" by M Frank in particular is pretty good.

There have been a few discussions here on LW about some of the implications of reversible computing for the far future. Not all algorithms can take advantage of reversibility, but it looks like reversible simulations in general are feasible if they unwind time, and in particular monte carlo simulation algorithms could recycle entropy bits without unwinding time.

Comment author: TylerJay 06 May 2015 02:29:28AM 0 points [-]

Thanks, I'll check it out.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 April 2015 08:13:19PM *  3 points [-]

You might be interested in Kryder's Law.

Comment author: DataPacRat 30 April 2015 08:31:11PM 2 points [-]

That's a good start. Let's see; if we start with platters holding 0.6 terabytes in 2014, and assume an annual 15% increase, then platters start hitting the petabyte range in... 2070ish? Does that look about right?

(Yes, I know any particular percentage can be argued against. This is for fiction - I'm going for reasonable plausibility, not for betting on prediction-market futures.)

Comment author: Lumifer 30 April 2015 08:45:33PM 1 point [-]

1.15^50 = 1084, so given the 15% rate of growth you'll have an increase of about three orders of magnitude in fifty years.

In this specific case, though, the issue is whether rotating-platter technology will survive. In a way it's a relic -- this is a mechanical device with physical objects moving inside, at pretty high speed and with pretty tiny tolerances, too. Solid-state "hard drives" are smaller, faster, less power-hungry, and more robust already. Their only problem is that SSDs are more expensive per GB, but that's a fixable problem.

Comment author: DataPacRat 30 April 2015 08:57:17PM 2 points [-]

the issue is

True - but for my purposes, having /some/ number, even if it's known to use poor assumptions, is better than none. I'm looking for things like "in which decade does a program requiring X MIPS become cheaper than minimum wage?" and "when can 100 petabytes be stuffed into ~1500 cm^3 or less, and how much will it cost?". Which crossovers happen in which order is more interesting than nailing down an exact year.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 April 2015 09:13:33PM *  2 points [-]

when can 100 petabytes be stuffed into ~1500 cm^3 or less

Well... a 200Gb microSD card already exists. So you need five of them per 1Tb, 5000 per 1Pb and 500,000 per 100 Pbs.

A microSD card is 11 x 15 x 1 mm = 165 mm3 = 0.165 cm3 and some of that is packaging and connectors.

500,000 x 0.165 = 82,500 cm3. You wanted 1,500? That's only about 50 times difference and getting rid of all that packaging and connectors should get you to about 30 times difference, more or less.

So the current flash memory density has to improve only by a factor of 30 or so to get you to your goal. That doesn't seem to be too far off.

The fun task of calculating the bandwidth of one of those stuffed to the gills with contemporary microSD cards is left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Comment author: CellBioGuy 01 May 2015 06:08:27AM 1 point [-]

Don't forget about the sheer amount of waste heat used by such an array were it actually on.

Comment author: Lumifer 01 May 2015 02:31:57PM 1 point [-]

Depends on the use case, I guess. The memory is non-volatile and the start-up time is negligible. If you only access one petabyte of memory within some time period, the other 99 can stay switched off and emit no heat.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 30 April 2015 10:09:12PM 1 point [-]

I'm looking for things like "in which decade does a program requiring X MIPS become cheaper than minimum wage?"

In about a decade we will have machines that cost less than $10,000 and can run roughly brain sized ANNs. However, this prediction relies more on software simulation improvement rather than hardware.

"when can 100 petabytes be stuffed into ~1500 cm^3 or less, and how much will it cost?".

Storage is much less of an issue for brain sims because synaptic connections are extremely compressible using a variety of techniques. Indeed current ANNs already take advantage of this to a degree. Also, using typical combinations of model and data parallelism a population of AIs can share most of their synaptic connections.