  Computing has dramatically changed nearly every aspect of our lives, from
business and agriculture to communication and entertainment. As a nation, we
rely on computing in the design of systems for energy, transportation and
defense; and computing fuels scientific discoveries that will improve our
fundamental understanding of the world and help develop solutions to major
challenges in health and the environment. Computing has changed our world, in
part, because our innovations can run on computers whose performance and
cost-performance has improved a million-fold over the last few decades. A
driving force behind this has been a repeated doubling of the transistors per
chip, dubbed Moore's Law. A concomitant enabler has been Dennard Scaling that
has permitted these performance doublings at roughly constant power, but, as we
will see, both trends face challenges. Consider for a moment the impact of
these two trends over the past 30 years. A 1980's supercomputer (e.g. a Cray 2)
was rated at nearly 2 Gflops and consumed nearly 200 KW of power. At the time,
it was used for high performance and national-scale applications ranging from
weather forecasting to nuclear weapons research. A computer of similar
performance now fits in our pocket and consumes less than 10 watts. What would
be the implications of a similar computing/power reduction over the next 30
years - that is, taking a petaflop-scale machine (e.g. the Cray XK7 which
requires about 500 KW for 1 Pflop (=1015 operations/sec) performance) and
repeating that process? What is possible with such a computer in your pocket?
How would it change the landscape of high capacity computing? In the remainder
of this paper, we articulate some opportunities and challenges for dramatic
performance improvements of both personal to national scale computing, and
discuss some "out of the box" possibilities for achieving computing at this
scale.
