COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

We will briefly describe recent breakthrough in design of massively parallel systems based on insights derived from global optimization problems having multiple global optima. These designs include:

• Physical design of the projective geometry machine using massively parallel quantum tunneling, which can totally overcome obstacles of latency and bandwidth faced by contemporary designs. The new design can broaden applicability of massive multi-threading to large and very general classes of computational problems, and can be implemented using already known fabrication techniques.
• Design of multi-ported, low latency, secondary storage based on magneto-optics, implementing shared memory directly at physical level, providing a highly valuable feature for data bases and transactional memory.
• Design of new high bandwidth switches required for next generation internet infrastructure.
• Design of novel robots with large number of "electro-magnetic fingers" for placing atoms based on complex and sparse patterns of multiple global minima that are more general than regular periodic patterns achieved before using interference lithography.
• Design of control systems whose stability analysis requires liapunov-like functions with multiple basins of attraction.
• Design of phased-array radars in tera-hertz range.
• Computational calibration of parameters occurring in empirical force fields, whose values may be difficult to measure experimentally but can be reverse engineered from known structure of folded proteins.

This work involves integration of ideas, concepts and processes from many fields:

• Math (Optimization theory, Discrete subgroups of lie groups)
• CS (Parallel Architectures)
• Physics (Path integrals, Quantum tunneling, Optics, Electron Optics)
• EE (CMOS & MEMS processes, Field emission devices, Control Theory)
• Material Science (Generalized interference lithography)

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