Slashdot Mirror
Researchers Building Computers That Run on Light
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers in England are attempting to build a desktop computer that runs on light rather than electronics. A $1.6 million research project starting in June at the University of Bath is focused on developing attosecond technology, which refers to continuously emitting light pulses that last just a billion-billionth of a second."
Nothing to see here... Brilliant!
billion-billionth of a second
So whats that a giga-gigahertz?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
runs on sperm! Mine would be a supercomputer!!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
Register the editry.
I can give you all the attosecond pulses of light you want -- as long as they're all ones.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
But does it run Linux? That has to be considered first!
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Would that be like having a transistor operating at one billion gigahertz?
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
now all those case modders will have their lights built in!
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
If the light pulses only last a certain amount of time, could you get them to last something like 1/3^8 seconds?
God spoke to me.
That is England, Europe.
Modern photonics, if it works within a computer, will make it impossible to eavesdrop on a computer with a van-eck style of a attack. Granted, van eck phreaking a VGA cable may be doable (barely), and performing similar snoops on a motherboard may seem incredibly difficult even by today's standards, it is within the realm of possibility. Take a look at the field of acoustic cryptanalysis and its potential.
Now extend that into the electromagnetic spectrum, give yourself a very powerful broadband software defined radio and a good isolated faraday cage, and could it be possible to mount a similar attack electronically?
If photonics take over, we will for once be in a safe-zone of knowing once and for all that no overly powerful overseeing entity will be able to eavesdrop on any kind of electromagnetic emissions, so long as you don't have any light leaks.
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
No, they aren't! The article didn't mention desktop computers at all. As expected, this is basic research on photonics. The researchers are nowhere closer to build a desktop computer that run on light, than they are to build a desktop computer that runs on steam and valves. Whether it is the submitters or editors who are idiots is hard to tell, but my guess is that both of them would score pretty well on that scale! Maybe we should build desktop computers of them?
They're all wet. The University of Shower has already disproven most of this. Even the lesser known School of Sponge Bath has taken a "dim" view.
I know, I know. "Light"en up...
Stop me now before my Karma takes a Bath.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
What happens when we run out of light and have to look for alternative sources of lightergy?
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
I had not heard of this before. I guess I must have been in the dark.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
One billion billion flashes per second? I hope it comes with a warning about triggering seizures...
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Yes! No more electricity bills, just put your computer in the sun. Now all those people living in huts in the desert can have computers running. Now all I need is a computer that runs on light.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Optical computing is this wonderfully elaborate field for which the critical component - an optical transistor - exists only in imagination. Simply put, matter and electromagnetism just don't interact strongly enough to make one of this things feasible. It's sort of like cold fusion - it's a technology that's perpetually one decade away.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
...
(One, two, three, four,
one,) And he was
BLInded by the
light (two, three,) wrapped
up, like a deuce, another
runner in the night. (four,
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not explained are the basics of how such a computer would work, even in the extended article; i.e., how do they make a basic AND/OR gate? Optical switches tend to be orders of magnitude more complex that similar switches in electronics.
From TFA: "But so far photonics can use light whose waveform is in one shape only - a curve known as a sine wave"
I am not an expert in quantum physics, but I believe this to be a basic property of light. Are these researchers endeavoring to create a new type of particle? On the other hand, the author of this article goes by the name "Alpha Doggs" (yes, with 2 g's)....
Will said desktop be lightweight?
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
The original article does indeed talk about being closer to desktop computers that use photonics, as does the news article that is directly linked to from Slashdot. Even though the main body of the article doesn't talk about desktop computing, the strong implication of the press release is that that is exactly what the researchers are working on. This is far from the worst headline ever and is actually a pretty decent writeup, even if it is only of the first paragraph.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"The researchers are nowhere closer to build a desktop computer that run on light, than they are to build a desktop computer that runs on steam and valves."
Oh I don't know. Steampunk is pretty cool.
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I didn't RTFA, but hey, this is slashdot, it wouldn't be the same if I did. It is great to see that people can process light without the use of electronics.
In the long term the common consumer and investor must approach this technology cautiously. We must remember the cycle that we went through with electronics. That cycle will be repeated with photonics. First they will create an AND gate, then an OR gate, then higher order functions, then the functions will be arranged on a die to make a processor, then the processors will begin to differentiate and will inherit different functions, then the processors will begin to aggregate and some processors will assimilate others. Eventually the architecture of processors will stabilize and they will begin to accelerate.
Except that, since we've been through the logical darwinian evolution of electronics once already, we should be able to refine most of these steps. Don't be caught upgrading your photonic computer once a year for every 100 MHz (or comparable measure of units) increase in the main processor. Don't be roped into investing in every half-ass component chip maker.
It will be highly enlightening to see how the photonics industry develops after the electronics industry already cut the path once.
Personally I'm waiting to see them develop bidirectional logic gates. Electrons are localized enough that current computer technology relies on logic gates functioning, for the most part, in one direction. There isn't much feedback. With photonics I fully expect to see logical functions whose inputs and results are codependent.
Has anyone studied the possibilities of programming using bidirectional logic?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
This is an English Press Release about an English University. How do we know it's not an English billion? (That would make it a giga-giga-gigahertz.) Sure, technology is usually metric, but the English have been rebelling against such European standards for decades. (Bath, being a Roman city, is probably still using Roman units, not Imperial units.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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Does it run Linux?
Soon, haxx0rz can r00t boxen at the speed of light!
A billion-billionth second should be enough for anyone!
continuously emitting light pulses that last just a billion-billionth of a second.
A billion billionths of a second! That sounds very fast indeed; around 1 Hz!
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
It's not real powerful but it runs on light. Very similar to this.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
But does it run Linux?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I said I wanted a BUD light!
So what?
I already have a calculator that runs on light.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Mod parent up for funny and for insightful!
(E'en tho 'twere but a flash of insight...)
deserves a great big attaboy.
i predict that after light will be lazer, after lazer there will be specific high freq spectrum lasers, after that there will be multispectrum laser, after that princess Leia will show up as a hologram in the processor asking for help, or is that this new windows BSOD
.. and that's not going to happen.
Mission accomplished, in terms of writing a PhD proposal that wouldn't seem dull.
... maybe one day we can run Vista fast enough to be functional.
To be legitimately called attosecond pulse, it must be shorter 100 attoseconds (10^-16 seconds). That would mean that one would need > 10^16 Hz of bandwidth just to obey basic fourier analysis, giving us a center free space wavelength of 30nm. It is pretty hard to call such an electromagnetic wave 'light', seeing as it is so deep into the hard UV, it's almost an x-ray ( 10^16 Hz of bandwidth.
Light? In my IT dungeon?
Surely this is an act of war against pasty code monkeys.
Its the amazing technicolor cheese wedge!
Might such a computing system display any fun behavior if carried aboard a vessel approaching the speed of light?
Couldn't find anything interesting or worthy in this short article.
.. gates. Because light can cross itself without disturbance of signal, it brings new properties.
The problem with opto-computing is the enormous amount of money spent on silicon based one (read Intel, AMD), that dwarfs the advantages you get from using light instead of plain silicon electronics.
(Steve Jobs is rumoured to have considered opto-computing at one time for a personal computer)
And no, you don't just replicate the AND, OR, etc
Namely, to do matrix multiplications in O(1).
There are specialised light computers for sale that do just that (at blazing speed).
...desktop computer that runs on light.
Pfft... Running on light doesn't do it for me, I'll wait until they build it out of light.
Cunning resemblance:
. jpg
/ 4c/10587.jpg
http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/images//fetah-benabid3
http://image.com.com/tv/images/processed/thumb/24
A computer that can run notepad as fast as I want it to!
I had one of these things. It was a pocket calculator. I needed to be in a bright room or it didn't work. I don't think it was as fast as this though... :-p
If Bush wants to kill the terrorists, he should jump off a cliff.
I'm working on a computer that runs on DARK!
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
Hi - I'm from the University of Bath, and wrote the press release with our researcher, Dr Fetah Benabid. I won't speak for myself, but I'd like to assure you Dr Benabid isn't an idiot; in fact he's a very talented, prize-winning physicist. I'll spare you the PR on the University, but it's fair to say that we do some very interesting research on photonics here which is already changing the world of applied physics. The press release is accurate (honest) - if this research works then physicists will be a big step forward to developing a computer whose memory runs on photons rather than electrons. It's a fair way off, but often the clever stuff starts in university lab with a far-fetched sounding idea. Any failure to convey the science well is mine, but I can assure you the research work is for real. Anyway, just a thought - Tony Trueman