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Understanding how much energy is needed and dissipated as heat for a given computational system and for a given program is a physically interesting and practically important problem. However, the thermodynamic costs of computational systems…
Landauer's limit on heat dissipation during information erasure is critical as devices shrink, requiring optimal pure-state preparation to minimise errors. However, Nernst's third law states this demands infinite resources in energy, time,…
The study of intelligent systems explains behaviour in terms of economic rationality. This results in an optimization principle involving a function or utility, which states that the system will evolve until the configuration of maximum…
Landauer's principle asserts that any computation has an unavoidable energy cost that grows proportionally to its degree of logical irreversibility. But even a logically reversible operation, when run on a physical processor that operates…
Major innovations in computing have been driven by scaling up computing infrastructure, while aggressively optimizing operating costs. The result is a network of worldwide datacenters that consume a large amount of energy, mostly in an…
The second law of thermodynamics is probabilistic in nature. Its formulation requires that the state of a system be described by a probability distribution. A natural question, thereby, arises as to whether a prior knowledge about the state…
Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero by paying a cost…
Quantum correlation, or entanglement, is now believed to be an indispensable physical resource for certain tasks in quantum information processing, for which classically correlated states cannot be useful. Besides information processing,…
It is argued using a Gedankenexperiment that a scalable quantum memory could be used as a perpetuum mobile of the second kind and hence cannot be realized in Nature. The reasoning is based on the assumption that the Landauer's principle for…
The hardware and software foundations laid in the first half of the 20th Century enabled the computing technologies that have transformed the world, but these foundations are now under siege. The current computing paradigm, which is the…
The purpose of this report is to show that computer and allied technologies can be used to increase energy efficiency. The report is divided into transport, industrial, commercial and domestic sections, which correspond to the major energy…
We use ideas from distributed computing and game theory to study dynamic and decentralized environments in which computational nodes, or decision makers, interact strategically and with limited information. In such environments, which arise…
With a class of quantum heat engines which consists of two-energy-eigenstate systems undergoing, respectively, quantum adiabatic processes and energy exchanges with heat baths at different stages of a cycle, we are able to clarify some…
It is widely accepted that information erasure entails heat dissipation. Here we analyze asymmetric memory states to show that this energy cost can be shuffled around to any step in a write-erase cycle and need not accompany the logically…
We develop a physics-based model for classical computation based on autonomous quantum thermal machines. These machines consist of few interacting quantum bits (qubits) connected to several environments at different temperatures. Heat flows…
Despite constant improvements in efficiency, today's data centers and networks consume enormous amounts of energy and this demand is expected to rise even further. An important research question is whether and how fog computing can curb…
A unification of thermodynamics and information theory is proposed. It is argued that similarly to the randomness due to collisions in thermal systems, the quenched randomness that exists in data files in informatics systems contributes to…
Energy consumption is a growing issue in data centers, impacting their economic viability and their public image. In this work we empirically characterize the power and energy consumed by different types of servers. In particular, in order…
Almost all processes -- highly correlated, weakly correlated, or correlated not at all---exhibit statistical fluctuations. Often physical laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, address only typical realizations -- as highlighted by…
After presenting possible motives for fighting against the second law of thermodynamics, several attempts to beat this law are analyzed. The second law wins, but an interesting interpretation of it emerges. This interpretation uses the…