Since the beginning of modern computer science some sixty years ago, we are building computers in more or less the same way. Silicon electronics serves as a physical substrate, the von Neumann architecture provides a computer design model, while the abstract Turing machine concept supports the theoretical foundations. That is changing: in recent years, unimagined computing devices have seen the light because of advances in synthetic biology, nanotechnology, material science, and neuroscience. These novel devices typically share the following two characteristics: (1) they are made up from massive numbers of simple, stochastic components which (2) are embedded in 2D or 3D space in a disordered way. A grand challenge in computer science consists in developing computing paradigms, design methodologies, formal frameworks, architectures, and tools that allow to reliably compute and efficiently solve problems with such emerging devices.
In this talk, I will outline my visionary and long-term research efforts to address the grand challenge of building, organizing, and programming future computing machines. First, I will review some exemplary future and emerging computing devices and highlight the particular challenges that arise for performing computations with them. I will then delineate potential solutions on how these challenges might be addressed. Self-assembled nano-scale electronics, cellular automata (CAs), and random boolean networks (RBNs) will serve as a simple showcase. For example, I will show that irregular assemblies and specific interconnects can have major advantages over purely regular and locally interconnected fabrics. I will further present the efforts underway to self-assemble massive-scale nanowire-based interconnect fabrics for spatial computers and what the challenges are in terms of computations and communication in such a system.
Christof Teuscher holds an assistant professor position in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Portland State University and an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2000 and 2004 respectively. In 2004 he became a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), in 2005 a distinguished Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and in 2007 a Technical Staff Member. His main research interests include emerging computing architectures and paradigms, biologically-inspired computing, complex & adaptive systems, and cognitive science. Teuscher has received several prestigious awards and fellowships. For more information visit: http://www.teuscher.ch/christof