Latency has been scaling worse than almost any other factor for nearly the entire history of computing. The latency/throughput ratio for storage, networking, me

Latency has been scaling worse than almost any other factor for nearly the entire history of computing. The latency/throughput ratio for storage, networking, memory, cache and almost everything else has been rising continuously since the 70s and is likely to carry on rising. This is going to have big consequences for the way that we design systems in the future. Transferring a large amount of data is going to be cheap and fast. Seeking, handshaking, back-and-forth and any other latency sensitive operations are going to be slow and expensive. This has already played a big role in algorithm design in HPC, and is going to start being felt to a much larger degree in the wider field over the next decade. As the latency/throughput ratio gets bigger, the tradeoffs behind optimal system design will change. 30ms for a Cray 1 was only 2400 clock cycles. 8ms for a modern CPU is around 30 million. That's a big change.