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This paper concludes a three-Part series on the limits the laws of physics place on the sustained performance of reversible computers. Part I concerned aggregate performance in terms of computational operations per unit time, but neglected…
Deterministic synchronous systems consisting of two finite automata running in opposite directions on a shared read-only input are studied with respect to their ability to perform reversible computations, which means that the automata are…
Reversible computation has been recognised as a potential solution to the technological bottleneck in the future of computing machinery. Rolf Landauer determined the lower limit for power dissipation in computation and noted that…
If the 20th century was known for the computational revolution, what will the 21st be known for? Perhaps the recent strides in the nascent fields of molecular programming and biological computation will help bring about the 'Coming Era of…
A critical analysis of the feasibility of reversible computing is performed. The key question is: Is it possible to build a completely reversible computer? A closer look into the internal aspects of the reversible computing as well as the…
It is now widely accepted that the CMOS technology implementing irreversible logic will hit a scaling limit beyond 2016, and that the increased power dissipation is a major limiting factor. Reversible computing can potentially require…
Noisy computation and reversible computation have been studied separately, and it is known that they are as powerful as unrestricted computation. We study the case where both noise and reversibility are combined and show that the combined…
Fault-tolerant schemes can use error correction to make a quantum computation arbitrarily ac- curate, provided that errors per physical component are smaller than a certain threshold and in- dependent of the computer size. However in…
While there are various approaches to benchmark physical processors, recent findings have focused on computational phase transitions. This is due to several factors. Importantly, the hardest instances appear to be well-concentrated in a…
While Landauer's Principle sets a lower bound for the work required for a computation, that work is recoverable for efficient computations. However, practical physical computers, such as modern digital computers or biochemical systems, are…
Current computers operate at enormous speeds of ~10^13 bits/s, but their principle of sequential logic operation has remained unchanged since the 1950s. Though our brain is much slower on a per-neuron base (~10^3 firings/s), it is capable…
The key factor currently limiting the advancement of computational power of electronic computation is no longer the manufacturing density and speed of components, but rather their high energy consumption. While it has been widely argued…
Memory latency, bandwidth, capacity, and energy increasingly limit performance. In this paper, we reconsider proposed system architectures that consist of huge (many-terabyte to petabyte scale) memories shared among large numbers of CPUs.…
Several aspects of the problem of asynchronous point-to-point communication without feedback are developed when the source is highly intermittent. In the system model of interest, the codeword is transmitted at a random time within a…
Framing computation as the transformation of metastable memories, we explore its fundamental thermodynamic limits. The true power of information follows from a novel decomposition of nonequilibrium free energy derived here, which provides a…
Modern digital electronics support remarkably reliable computing, especially given the challenge of controlling nanoscale logical components that interact in fluctuating environments. However, we demonstrate that the high-reliability limit…
We study the scalability of consensus-based distributed optimization algorithms by considering two questions: How many processors should we use for a given problem, and how often should they communicate when communication is not free?…
Nuclear magnetic resonance offers an appealing prospect for implementation of quantum computers, because of the long coherence times associated with nuclear spins, and extensive laboratory experience in manipulating the spins with radio…
While externally driven information engines are well understood, the thermodynamic constraints of their autonomous counterparts remain an open question. Here, we investigate the finite-time operation of an autonomous machine functioning as…
Asynchronous computation and gradient compression have emerged as two key techniques for achieving scalability in distributed optimization for large-scale machine learning. This paper presents a unified analysis framework for distributed…