The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?

Citation
National Research Council, Committee on Sustaining Growth in Computing Performance, The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level? (Samuel H. Fuller & Lynette I. Millett, eds. 2011) (full-text).

Overview
The end of dramatic exponential growth in single-processor performance marks the end of the dominance of the single microprocessor in computing. The era of sequential computing must give way to a new era in which parallelism is at the forefront. Although important scientific and engineering challenges lie ahead, this is an opportune time for innovation in programming systems and computing architectures. We have already begun to see diversity in computer designs to optimize for such considerations as power and throughput. The next generation of discoveries is likely to require advances at both the hardware and software levels of computing systems.