Fiber optic racetrack makes for an excellent computer

Enlarge / The future of computing? (credit: DOE)

Many Ars readers love to argue the details of different computer architectures. Cache implementations, pipelines, and other minutiae are all put under the microscope and declared wanting by someone (and excellent by others). From my perspective, all commercial computer architectures are the same, and you have to leave the world of silicon to find radically different computers.

And radical is what we have received from groups of Japanese and American researchers. They have used light pulses, circulating in a fiber optic racetrack, to create a computer that is very scalable—and seemingly pretty fast.

Isolation is bad

The computers we play with every day use logic gates. These gates set every bit in memory by performing a series of logic operations. To solve a problem, we first have to design an algorithm that will generate a solution. Then, that algorithm has to be translated into a series of logic operations that can be fed to the computer. There are, of course, numerous ways to optimize—dividing the problem across multiple CPUs, for instance—but at heart, it's all the same logic. It has the great benefit of being universal. Any computation is possible; you just might still be waiting for the solution when the Universe dies.