Title: Financial crisis and technical progress 2008-2017. The parallel shift in information technology

Authors: Marius M. Balas

Addresses: Engineering Faculty, Aurel Vlaicu University of Arad, Romania

Abstract: The paper discuss the paradoxical relationship between the 2008 global financial crisis, which triggered a widespread economic recession, and the technical progress rate, which blossomed the following years. We explain this phenomenon by the significant decreasing of the financial leverage caused by the crisis. The automotive industry, with the launching of the fully electric car is illustrating the thesis. In IT the crisis triggered a shift towards the parallel computing. Outstanding achievements in avionics, biomedical/health care equipment, or dataflow computing reveal a strategic superiority of parallel systems (FPGA/ASIC) over the conventional CPU bus oriented computing devices (von Neumann architectures: microcontrollers, DSPs, etc.) in most respects: speed, energy consumption, size, weight or reliability. Still the parallel shift implies new paradigms, costs and efforts and the mainstream of the IT establishment has been reluctant so far to the parallel shift. Last events show a new attitude and interest for parallel architectures.

Keywords: financial crisis; financial leverage; fully electric car; von Neumann architecture; gate array; parallel computing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSYSE.2017.089194

International Journal of Computational Systems Engineering, 2017 Vol.3 No.4, pp.213 - 219

Received: 01 Aug 2016
Accepted: 18 Apr 2017

Published online: 09 Jan 2018 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article