Superconducting for Greener Computing
The energy/power consumption of the computing industry is growing at a rapid pace as cloud services broaden their reach into a diverse range of societal needs. The energy usage growth and the associated carbon impact require us to invest in alternate computing fabrics that have a much lower energy footprint. Superconductive computing is one such computing fabric that can deliver ultra-high performance and energy efficiency at scale. But superconductive technology has formidable research challenges that must be resolved before it can be brought to the marketplace. In this technical tutorial, we present key fundamentals of superconductive computing, explain the reason behind why this emerging technology is revolutionary for its energy efficiency, and then we present key challenges that must be addressed to make it viable for fabrication and practical deployment. Circuit path balancing, gate-level pipelining, and memory capacity limitations are just a few examples of the challenges that must be overcome. We discuss several recent advances our DISCoVER Expeditions in Computing team is making related to physical scaling, chip-level integration, compact modeling, design tool support, on-chip memory design, architecture design, and full-system design and integration, including interfacing to room-temperature (non-superconductive) electronics. Our research reduces the technology barriers that pave the way toward feasibly building complex superconductive computing systems in the near future.
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