This blog post includes contributions from Josh Deutsch (UC Santa Cruz), Mike DeWeese (UC Berkeley), and Lee Altenberg (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa).  In early January, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) hosted a visioning workshop on Thermodynamic Computing in Honolulu, Hawaii in order to establish a community of like-minded visionaries; craft a statement of research needs; and summarize the current state of understanding within this new area of computing. Following the Thermodynamic Computing workshop, the CCC sponsored the related Manoa Mini-Symposium on Physics of Adaptive Computation at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Susanne Still (University of Hawaiʻi) was one of the leaders of the Thermodynamic Computing workshop and organized the mini-symposium, which featured nine […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by CCC Executive Council Member Mark D. Hill of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Full disclosure: He is working with one of the authors—Luis Ceze—and Tom Wenisch on visioning via Architecture 2030 at ISCA 2016.   The invention of writing enabled us to reliably transmit information into the future. Stone tablets, papyrus, velum, and paper can be read centuries if not millennia later. But how much of the digital information that we created over the last 75 years will be readable much later? How much is even readable now? Wouldn’t it be valuable if we could record digital information in a medium that […]