Memcomputer mimics human brain; may outperform supercomputers

As the human need for computing grows, researchers are faced with the problem of creating more computing power from existing electronics. The solution so far was thought to be with the 'quantum computers' - that put all the atomic level physics to the job. The quantum computers however pose a big problem: they need to be maintained in an environment that isn't very practical to achieve and maintain. The fix? Say hello to memcomputers. University of California's computer scientist, Massimiliano Di Ventra is working on them already.

Di Ventra and his team are developing memcomputer - a special computer that derives inspiration from human brain. However, in order to understand these memcomputers, you will have to understand the 'basic' problem with our existing computers.

Our current computers store data in one location and process it at some other (Central Processing Unit). Now, the data must travel to and fro between these locations for every computing cycle. For example, if you run a computer program to find out how many numbers from a given set of numbers add up to 100; the computer will have to pick up a number, keep adding various sets of numbers and store every result in memory to find out the final result. Imagine if the number set has millions of entries; like it is when you are dealing with complex math problems. The computer will essentially run into an extremely long marathon of calculations.


For each of the computing cycle, data will have to travel from memory to the CPU and back. A lot of power is wasted in this process. Di Ventra explains this with an analogy. Our own brains consumes about 20W to perform about 10^16 operations per second. A supercomputer, on the other hand would need 10 million times more power to do that.

D Ventra and his team believe that memcomputers will be able to address this problem with the help of memprocessors. They will function similar to that of transistors - the basic building blocks of modern electronics; but with an additional function that they will also store charge. This allows them to store the data and process it simultaneously - just like our human brain does.

Memcomputers would take only a few seconds to solve complex mathematical problems that our current generation of supercomputers will take decades.

Di Ventra mentions that the memcomputers won't replace your regular computers in foreseeable future. These special computers will only be used for addressing specific problems they are very good at solving. The first prototype of memcomputer currently experiencing problem of data loss. There are multiple ways to address the problem; and Di Ventra's team is already working on it.

Source: Meet The Memcomputer: The Brain-Like Alternative to Quantum Computing