The June issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) features the Viewpoint article “A Vision to Compute Like Nature: Thermodynamically.” Based on the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) Thermodynamic Computing workshop, this article advocates for a novel, physically grounded, computational paradigm centered on thermodynamics that the authors call “Thermodynamic Computing” (TC). This Viewpoint was written by workshop co-organizers, Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), and Mark D. Hill (Microsoft & U. Wisconsin). In the article, they lay out the premise of TC: “…living systems evolve energy-efficient, universal, self-healing, and complex computational capabilities that dramatically transcend our current technologies. Animals, plants, bacteria, and proteins solve problems by spontaneously […]

In early October the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a virtual workshop on Physics & Engineering Issues in Adiabatic/Reversible Classical Computing. This workshop was organized by Michael (Mike) P. Frank (Sandia National Labs), Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (Zettaflops LLC), Jayson Lynch (University of Waterloo), Karpur Shukla (Brown University), Robert Wille (Johannes Kepler University Linz) with support from CCC Systems and Architecture task force members Mark Hill (Microsoft) and Sujata Banerjee (VMWare). It brought together over 40 participants with backgrounds in physics, engineering, and computer architecture to address the challenges that must be overcome to realize practical adiabatic/reversible classical computing. A workshop report, summarizing the discussions and conclusions from […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a virtual workshop the week of Oct. 5-9 (with a reception on Fri., Oct. 2) to address the physics & engineering challenges in adiabatic/ reversible classical computing. This workshop will gather the research community in this field, lay a common foundation of existing state-of-the-art knowledge, and work together to prepare a comprehensive workshop report that can make the case for a major new initiative effectively to federal-level decision-makers. Workshop participants will be selected by invitation only. We seek short position papers to help us create the agenda for the workshop and select attendees. You may submit a position paper here, and more details […]

A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This is part two of Khari Douglas’ interview with Natesh Ganesh, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Massachussetts at Amherst and a current Research Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder through the NIST Professional Research Experience Program (PREP). Natesh’s research interest lie in the fields of AI, neuromorphic hardware, thermodynamics (Natesh was an organizer of the CCC’s 2019 Thermodynamic Computing workshop, read the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report here), and the emergence of consciousness. In this episode we talk about some of the key contributors to the space of artificial consciousness and discuss the ethics […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is proud to be a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2020 Annual Meeting taking place February 12-16, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. This year the CCC is supporting five scientific sessions at the AAAS Annual Meeting in addition to two communications and outreach opportunities. Learn more about each of the sessions below. New Approaches to Fairness in Automated Decision Making Friday, February 14th 8:00 – 9:30 AM Synopsis: Critical decisions are increasingly being made by machine-learning algorithms based on massive data trails that people all leave behind. Such decisions affect issues from college admissions and bank loans, to sentencing and police deployment. Concerns have been raised […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report, the output of the CCC’s January 2019 visioning workshop of the same name. The workshop was organized by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (former Sandia National Laboratories), Natesh Ganesh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Susanne Still (University of Hawaii), John Paul Strachan (Hewlett Packard Lab HPE), R. Stanley Williams (Texas A&M). It brought together physical theorists, electrical and computer engineers, electronic/ionic device researchers, and theoretical biologists to explore a novel idea: computing as an open thermodynamic system. The report begins by explaining the need for thermodynamic computers: with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard […]