Full title: utilizing vectors in Java or how I learned to halt worrying and love the dark silicon apocalypse
Computation is increasingly constrained by power. With each advancement in the manufacturing process, a decreasing percent of the CPU can operate at full capacity, leading to the emergence of the word 'dark silicon'. This trend necessitates techniques that utilize chip area to optimize power efficiency through specialized accelerators. The presentation will outline key concepts that led to the dark silicon specified as Moore’s law and breakdown of Dennard scaling, followed by an overview of current and upcoming CPU accelerators. The focus will then shift to vector units and the specifics of vector programming. Attendees will be introduced to registers, a scope of vector operations, and methods to make branchless algorithms specified as sorting networks. The session will conclude with an overview of the fresh Java Vector API and how it was already picked up by projects to do AI inference (Llama 2) and vector search (AstraDB and Cassandra).
