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Complexity is the Only Constant: Trends in Computing and Their Relevance to Model Driven Engineering

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Graph Transformation (ICGT 2016)

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Abstract

Despite ever increasing computational power, the history of computing is characterized also by a constant battle with complexity. We will briefly review these trends and argue that, due to its focus on abstraction, automation, and analysis, the modeling community is ideally positioned to facilitate the development of future computing systems. More concretely, a few, select, technological and societal trends and developments will be discussed together with the research opportunities they present to researchers interested in modeling.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    So many alternative ones have been proposed [61] that even the study of complexity appears complex.

  2. 2.

    A web-based simulator can be found at http://svtsim.com/moonjs/agc.html.

  3. 3.

    https://www.quora.com/How-much-more-computing-power-does-an-iPhone-6-have- than-Apollo-11-What-is-another-modern-object-I-can-relate-the-same-computing- power-to.

  4. 4.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/worldwide-cost-of-it-failure-revisited-3-trillion.

  5. 5.

    At least 8 implementations are listed at https://github.com/sit/dht/wiki/faq.

  6. 6.

    http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html.

  7. 7.

    http://uday.io/2015/10/15/predicting-the-future-and-exponential-growth.

  8. 8.

    http://singularityhub.com/2012/10/15/19th-century-french-artists-predicted- the-world-of-the-future-in-this-series-of-postcards.

  9. 9.

    http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/personalcomputer.

  10. 10.

    https://eclipse.org/Xtext.

  11. 11.

    A discussion of the paper and the controversy it caused can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt.

  12. 12.

    Computers are even said to have “broken science”, https://www.eclipsecon.org/na2016/session/how-computers-have-broken-science-and-how-we-can-fix-it.

  13. 13.

    http://sc15.sueprcomputing.org.

  14. 14.

    http://d2i.indiana.edu/provenance_karma.

  15. 15.

    https://kepler-project.org.

  16. 16.

    http://www.fortiss.org/en/about-us/alle-news/autofocus-3.

  17. 17.

    https://xtuml.org.

  18. 18.

    https://eclipse.org/papyrus.

  19. 19.

    https://www.eclipse.org/papyrus-rt.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and by the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI).

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    Juergen Dingel

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    Mark Minas

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Dingel, J. (2016). Complexity is the Only Constant: Trends in Computing and Their Relevance to Model Driven Engineering. In: Echahed, R., Minas, M. (eds) Graph Transformation. ICGT 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9761. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40530-8_1

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