Keynote talk: Parallel programming for mobile computing

Summary form only given. Personal computing is going mobile and applications are changing to adapt to take advantage of new opportunities offered by permanent availability and connectivity. Mobile devices are a significant departure from traditional computing. On one hand, they are very personal, always on, always connected. They promise to fulfill the promise of being the hub for our digital lives. On the other hand, they are much more constrained in terms of resources than desktops. Even though progress in their computing capabilities has been staggering, they continue to rely on battery power and are packaged in appealing packages that are a nightmare for thermal dissipation. In this talk I will present the challenges facing programmers for mobile devices driven by architectural and packaging constraints, as well as the changes in applications domains. I will give examples on how we used concurrency to improve performance and power efficiency, in a number of projects at Qualcomm Research, including the Zoomm parallel browser.