How Hardware Evolution is Driving Software Systems

Computing Systems are undergoing a multitude of interesting changes: from the platforms (cloud, appliances) to the workloads, data types, and operations (big data, machine learning). Many of these changes are driven or being tackled through innovation in hardware even to the point of having fully specialized designs for particular applications. In this talk I will review some of the most important changes happening in hardware and discuss how they affect system design as well as the opportunities they create. I will focus on data processing with an emphasis on streams and event based systems but also discuss applications in other areas. I will also briefly discuss how these trends are likely to result in a very different form of IT, and consequently of Computer Science, from the one we know today.