What Does the Post-Moore Era Mean for Research Software Engineering?
It highlights a paradigm shift in computing that affects software engineering practices, but it is incremental as it summarizes existing trends without presenting new methods or data.
This position paper addresses the challenges and opportunities for research software engineering in the post-Moore era, where performance growth must rely on heterogeneity and hardware specialization rather than transistor scaling.
We are entering the post-Moore era where we no longer enjoy the free ride of the performance growth from simply shrinking the transistor features. However, this does not necessarily mean that we are entering a dark era of computing. On the contrary, sustaining the performance growth of computing in the post-Moore era itself is cutting-edge research. Concretely, heterogeneity and hardware specialization are becoming promising approaches in hardware designs. However, these are paradigm shifts in computer architecture. So what does the post-Moore era mean for research software engineering? This position paper addresses such a question by summarizing possible challenges and opportunities for research software engineering in the post-Moore era. We then briefly discuss what is missing and how we prepare to tackle such challenges and exploit opportunities for the future of computing.