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Bulk Technology Might Produce Molecular Computers
PerlDiver writes "Researchers for UCLA and Hewlett-Packard have announced the creation of molecular logic gates utilizing rotoxane. " Consider this to be my little touch of nanotechnology today.
The discrepancy in speed between processor and I/O is already huge. It will only get worse.
Although when you really get down to it, it's our human bodies which have become too slow to interact with these machines at peak efficiency.
This stuff is not just the product of scientists' fevered brains. Let me tell you about an actual supercomputer I encountered this morning. I am not the operator or anything like that, I merely encountered it, so my understanding of how it actually works is foggy. But it's used in physics research.
This computer consists of several million processors. It cost USD $4 million to buy. Each processor in itself is of course not capable of a whole lot -- can only take 16 bits of data at a time. But they use these to do simulations on particles -- each processor calculates the path/interaction of each particle.
But this thing must take up an entire room right? Use your imagination. We are talking computation on a molecular level. Each individual bit is a particle on a molecule.
The person I spoke to says that they have another computer on order -- this one will feature one billion processors. Liquid-state. You could put it in a flask.
But the cool thing about these types of computers -- no data is created or destroyed. It's just like the real world. There are no floating point or ALUs... if you want data, you have to pick it up and grab it from somewhere. Because no data is deleted, no heat is created. Laws of Thermodynamics. You could unplug the thing and it would continue to compute.
I think the term was NMR -- nuclear magnetic resonance... quantum computing.
Today.
The "crash/virus" immunity stuff does not
help their presentation. I am less inclined
to believe the rest of the article.
Assuming that this becomes practical one day, it really only implies that you can reduce the slowdown caused by distance. I would think that there is some necessary level of propagation delay. I doubt that it takes 0 time to change the spin of the initial particle, so even if the spin of the other particle is changed instantaneously, the entire operation would not be in 0 time.
If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, check out this road map from the EC micro-electronics research initiative
ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/esprit/docs/melnarm.pdf
Upload my mind into a computer and live in the ether? No way! I'd forget to pay my monthly computation bill, and they'd delete me.
More likely, you'd make the structure a bit more sensible, so it would be easier to do rollbacks (after all, if you don't support rollback, you loose lots of the advantages of having a complete log...)
Why are these news articles always written in
such a dumbed-down fashion?
Guess I'll wait for the Science article for
the useful information.
Its easy to not have viruses. With nanocomputers, you can imbed the logic into hardware on the fly. Want to change software? Just grow the new hardware. Hard coded software cannot be modified by bad data. It wouldn't be like todays processors that are a blank slate that operate on code to tell them what to do. Future processors could be unchangable mechanical systems.
Of course, a typical computer runs what you put onto it, so we would still have that kind of processor, a generic computing device. But for special protected systems, just use hard coded immutable logic.
That was the funniest thing I've read in quite a while. And the rebuttals are even funnier.
(By the way, he's telling the absolute truth, except maybe about the cost...though I think he might have messed up the part about the 16 bits)
Every month its a new "computing hardware breakthrough" announcements. 99 out of 100 wont
be able to commercially compete with size and
cost of silicon cmos.
use a spellchecker
I just read in NT magazine that ms plans to throw NT instead of wince in appliances because of stability but keep wince because of its requirements. NT is being tested for TV remote controlls and refrigerators. IT does require 64 megs of ram in all the appliances but with this new technology it souldnt be a problem!
Each grain of sand will have gigs of ram for win2k to be everywhere to your wallpaper at home, to your car, to your clothes, to even your toaster and it will all ber linked with com/dcom activex and dlls!
PRedicate HELL in the near future! Quick patent this before ms makes a deal with Hewlett Packard!
I predict great fear in the future!
Or so I understand it.
spurt spurt jizz spurt
Anybody know which journal this article is published? Is it this week Science?
Thanks.
The maximum of electrons moving thru a silicon based chip is 5 to 7 million cm per second (well below the speed of light) depending on the purity of the silicon crystal.
Gallium Arsenide based chips can move electrons at close to 15 millon cm per second. (Still well below SOL)
Speed of light is not the bottleneck yet.
hmm...does it mean one time use and then we need to take apart and rebuild the computer from scratch each programing cycle?
but with two type of gate, is not like we can do a lot anyway.
They're announcing that their nano-computers will be immune to viruses and crashes just to raise the price of their shares. Rich investors don't know what a virus is and they are ready to believe anything as long as they make money.
Posted by zyberphox:
i wonder what will happen if we really can produce nanotechnology on human.. do the old-stuff people will object this?
Sounds like hype with no details how these crystals differ from silicon crystals or its electrical charges are different from CMOS electrical charges. Sounds to me like they just have developed a new semiconductor based on a different crystal structure. Imune to computer viruses, crashes, and other glitches? That sounds like more of a quality of software programming. You can program with hardware, aka PALs and such, but one still needs to program sensible logic, such as disallowing macros in documents, granting root permissions for everyone to change the system, etc.
Hype, hype, hype, no juicy details.
I'm a bit disappointed that people's vision of the future includes printers.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
The tricky part would be to safely manage overrides. You'd want to alter files by writing a new one that overrides the old one, but then you've got some of your old problems again.
Has this kind of thing been studied at all? It looks interesting.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Of course, we may not be able to approach all forms of information processing in this way.
There are many factors that limit a computer's speed. Saying that the speed of light is one of them is one way to look at it. I prefer to think of the problem as one of gate/transistor density. Of course, if one could go faster than light, then density wouldn't matter much (though switching speed certainly would). The real fundamental limits we're coming to are more along the lines of what makes MOSFET transistors work. The smaller the transistor, the greater the leakage current if threshold voltage is scaled respectively. But keeping threshold voltage high results in reduced switching speed performance, unless you keep power supply voltage high -- a definite problem when dealing with such small devices.
I think "Moore's Law" will eventually be broken -- but the other way around. I think we've got a way to go before the limits of current technology are exhausted, and look at what we've got in the pipe. Silicon-Germanium, HEMT and HBT transistor designs, copper interconnect, silicon-on-insulator and multi-value computing will help extend the limits of today's designs. Advanced photonics is pretty much here, now, and waiting to be exploited on a large scale. Quantum, molecular and DNA computing are advancing by leaps and bounds, and hints of other things, such as "reconfigurable computing" also make for an exciting future.
Things have followed Moore's Law primarily for economic reasons. Once the above become economically feasible, we'll see not just linear advancements, but revolutions in computing power.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
Actually, quantum encryption beats quantum computing. You can't tap the data stream without collapsing the wave function.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
Does anyone else get the feeling the person who wrote this article was totally CLUELESS with regard to computer technology? No viruses? No crashes? Sort of like saying that, if you make the computer complex enough, it'll never have any bugs.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
This is really directed towards the quantum physics geeks out there...
What is the theoretical maximum speed for a computer? I mean, we can't go faster than the speed of light - and that's quickly being approached. Where a single electron can mean off or on... the speed of a computer will be limited solely by the speed of light in the near future. Which means massive parallelism will be the *only* way to go faster. Moore's law will be broken eventually... I wonder when.
--
As far as I can tell crash/virus immunity is pure nonsense -- In a formal sense, a computer that can't crash would need to solve the halting problem (or else how would it know that the computer had crashed or was simply taking a long time to execute an algorithm) which is provably impossible. Likewise, a virus is simply another type of program. In order to make a machine completely immune to viruses you have to make it immune to programming, and you don't have a computer any more.
:)
I'm guessing that they meant that if you have millions of processors, crashing/hanging a few doesn't make a difference. I don't buy this, because having all the processors in the world doesn't make a difference if your code won't run reliably on one. Put another way, sucky software still sucks no matter how many computers you run it on. Likewise, I could easily imagine a virus spreading through the entire molecular computer and rendering all of those millions of processors useless.
The small size and low-power consumption of molecular computers would be great, but there is a long way to go from building a few molecular logic gates in a laboratory and constructing a real machine capable of doing interesting work. My guess is that etched chips are here to stay for the next ten years or so, but if someone hands me a working molecular computer tomorrow I'll start work on the Linux port right away.
parallax
When we get nano tech computers ready for mass production, the fastest super computers today will look ridiculously under powered. I hope everyone with an interest in nano tech has read Diamond Age by Stephenson... an entertaining view into the posibilites of the technology.
Not all computers are personal computers. Not all computers need direct I/O devices hooked up to 'em. You're not going to need a monitor and keyboard hooked up to every node of.. say... a beowulf cluster.
The diminutive size opens up possibilities for *other* uses for computers. Smaller robots, tiny regulatory devices in people's bodies to perform any number of functions to keep a body running better, to name a few.
Even considering computers that *would* be for "personal use", think of how slimmer your laptop would be if the *only* bulk was for the keyboard and screen. Think of faster, more versitile PDAs. Heck. Think of a laptop containing an entire *network*. Or cluster. Or what have you.
There's certainly no cause for saying the possibilities of such development are limited by some need for big bulky things. If you want bulk, the smaller components mean you can cram more of 'em in there.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The void look in my PHB's eyes..
That bead of drool lowly rolling down his chin in staff meetings.
The PHB has been slashdotted!!
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
For the real story, read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online at www.foresight.org somewhere) and for a genuine technical treatise try "Nanosystems" by the same author. Diamond Age is a sci-fi novel, and while it might awaken you to the possibilities, you're far better off with scientific fact.
Btw, build a nanocomputer with the same architecture as a conventional one and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses - but the HP team has also designed the Teramac, a new architecture designed to "route around" failures.
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
The San Francisco Chronicle has a much better article. More technical details are toward the end.
Interesting: in the print edition, this was the lead article, page one, above the fold, top right. Also, there was a decent graphic (which I can't find online) accompanying the article.
Sorry. Just wanted to get that straight.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
First off, the title to this piece is essentially a tautology - bulk tech will have to be what leads us to nanotech, since bulk tech is all we had to start out with (unless you include natural bionanotech such as DNA - but there again, we discovered and until recently manipulated all such molecular-level structures with bulk tech).
Second, the practical limits to computing power (i.e. bang for the buck) as opposed to speed (pure MIPS/GIPS (?) or what have you) are what most people are really concerned about. There are many factors - pure clock speed (GHz, THz (?)), instructions/clock cycle (e.g. Intel's EPIC - sort of MPP on a single chip, AFAIK), instruction length/information density (32, 64, 128... bits cram more data into each instruction). So what if you have a multi-THz processor, if it only runs 4-bit instructions through 1 register! (Of course, this could accurately describe DNA....) Theoretical limits are fine, and can be measured by the application of quantum physics to information theory. But again, the lower limits such as network speed, memory/storage speed and bus/crossbar speed will hamper our current architectures for the near future. Sorry if it seems like I'm pointing out the obvious....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Have you ever read Eon by Greg Bear? It deals with that theme in detail. I highly recommend you pick it up some where it's a good Sci-Fi novel.
#include "mysig.h"
well, think of some nano-probes (that swim in your blood stream) that use their onboad computer to figure out if you are sick and then fix it. or if you are hurt they would then fix it. or if you are getting to old, fixed...
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
``We can potentially get the computational power of 100 workstations on the size of a grain of sand.''
This remind anyone of computing 50 years ago?:
"Well, possibly by the end of the millenium, computers will be so small, that you could fit them in to a *single room*, with room left over for a chair, and possibly even a teletype!"
And what the hell is this?:
"They will need far less power than current computers and may be able to hold vast amounts of data permanently, doing away with the need to erase files, and perhaps also be immune to computer viruses, crashes and other glitches."
Where did that come from? Doesn't it just yank your chain when a journalist just throws crap like this in. Why must people prattle on about stuff they don't know?!
Sigh...
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Several million "processors" huh? So, what kind of bus does this thing run on? I guess it must be NUMA. And the bus lines are subatomic in size right? I mean, if each processor is a "particle on a molicule"...(what??)
"Because no data is deleted, no heat is created"???? Where did you get that? Someone here (and it's not me) doesn't know how a traditional CPU works.
Now I'm not saying that such a thing doesn't exist, some NMR computing device, but I'll bet you anything that it's a little different than you have explained, and that you can't use it for much more than predicting simple particle behaviour.
P.S. Computer in a flask, HA! I have one right here on my desk, I call it coffee.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
They probably weren't thinking when they wrote that. Viruses exist in the data, so unless a good virus detection program were to run on it that could detect unknown virii (not possible), it's still susceptible. Crashes... ever try renaming a .txt or .bmp to .exe in win3.1 then try running it? it would crash with an out of memory error. maybe this will actually make it run (new programming theory: Bitmap PL). And yes, these things would be damn light, and powerful!
Agreed. I think that with computing power on this level, you may see something in the way of the Star Trek computers, with the visual/vocal/key input, and a central core type computer. Large businesses could have that, and maybe a laptop would have a silicon wafer with a grain or 2 implanted on it. Maybe a carbon wafer...
Implanting nanotech computers in people is cool; that is not disputed. We do, however, need to look at the possible downsides, as these buggers might prove to have some rather dark side effects, especially because with computers that size, molecular manipulation is a viable peripheral option.
E.g.:
1. "Your trial period for WinZip is now over, and you have selected not to uninstall. Thank you for using WinZip, and please enjoy our complementary copy of eHerpes 5.0"
2. "System resource conflict with HP SCSI mini-CD drive and Generic Liver."
3. "Speak to me! You're alive, I know it! God, why did I install NT on my brother?"
4. "Man, it's hell when you're in a job interview and you get some porn site's spam."
Who's to say they won't develope a display that can beam screen images directly onto your eye? That removes the monitor. There has already been talk for awhile about a virtual keyboard based on the position of your hands and fingers. Thus no keyboard, just a pair of gloves. I can see this technology getting to the point where you can use your computer anywhere. Carrying nothing but a pair of gloves. That would be cool.
Plank's constant describes the relationship between the energy of a photon and its wavelength. From this, a finite amount of time is derived, called the Plank time. This is the ultimate smallest discreet unit of time, the speed at which quantum fluctuations happen. It is something on the order of 5e-44. Now this is rather fast. However, this is only the speed limit for a single gate, assuming that it uses a single atom and changes a single quantum state. However, we run into more considerations with multiple gates and parallel processing. We also run into the problem of the bottlenecks of the system that runs it. In the final analysis, it is not how fast the processor can run, but how fast the surrounding equipment can run the processor.
If there's absolutely no way to delete files, then all a virus would have to do is create files until it filled your memory...
They will need far less power than current computers and may be able to hold vast amounts of data permanently, doing away with the need to erase files, and perhaps also be immune to computer viruses, crashes and other glitches.
Does anyone else understand how this works? How are they immune to viruses and crashes? What operating system do they run? Can you not install any programs?
Anyway, this will be a boon for mobile and wearable computer users!
Although I have not read the book, I can see the possibilites. The only caveat - when you have a computer the size of a grain of sand, you don't want to use it on the beach! We can't have computers that small because how can we work with them? Where do you attach a keyboard? We need big bulky machines we can lug around and use. The largest part is always the display and input/output devices - the printer, the monitor, the mouse, the keyboard. We need to look at new forms of input and output - and don't even mention speech. Who want's to only interact with their computer by talking??!!
Wow, a computer implanted in my eye! cool! Maybe I can use my fingernails for storage, and then delete things by getting out the clippers.
Well, there certainly would be privacy inherant in this system!
With all of this power, I'm going to abandon my body and upload my mind to a computer and live forever in the ether. Who's with me?
Don't even get into quantums! Quantam mechanics, while incredibly interesting, is also incredibly scary. Imagine being able to break any crypto instantaneously. No crypto is unbreakable because quantam computers can be built to an infinity dimensions, giving it infinity power, being only limited by how large you want to go. Artificial Intelligence will rule the earth, humans will be used as fuel, and the world will come to an end. :-) Exciting, no?
two words: shut. up. evil flamer - you trying to start a religious war? Go to college, you idiot. US$0.02
:-(
do you really think that the so-called "android" is the stuff of nightmares? If we could supplement human capabilities with internal as opposed to external machines (we already supplement human capabilities with external tools and machines) would this not be just giving people a set of on-board tools with which to operate? The possibilities are endless with this sort of tech. Think self diagnosis and healing: we could have an end to disease. Think information : We could even have an end to school. I don't think that we're anywhere near understanding how the mind works, so there is little chance of a machine replacing it. But there would be some pretty cool supplements to the human condition if we had an onboard IT environment to monitor and assist us. Not only that, by simply regulating the environment in which these applications will run, we will be able to steer the course of these developments to avoid the really scary stuff. There's nothing really scary about your desktop environment - Nanotech will reduce the need for us to be at work, which can only be a good thing.
I think my brain is dribbling out down the back of my legs
That's what it's called by the way. And I haven't been able to find a reliable source that confirms whether it accurs at the speed of light, or instantly. Different places say different things :/
I say this because most of the pathetic education aroound here (excluding Japan and Europe) does not even know what the hell Nanotechnology is in the first place. This alone, renders college completely useless. I feel sorry for all of you in college who are wasting your dear sweet time.