Analog vs. Digital: Old Question, New Answers

by Nikhil Shuka (University of Virginia)

Monday 29 Jul 2024, 15:00 → 17:00 US/Eastern

small seminar room

Digital computing has enjoyed tremendous success and has become the backbone of the modern

information revolution. However, the slowing down of one of its primary drivers, the Moore’s law, and

the increasing application-driven necessity to compute problems that have been traditionally

challenging to solve on digital machines, has created a convergent need to expand the boundaries

of current computing platforms. Non-von Neumann analog computing platforms capable of

harnessing the physics of natural systems offer a promising paradigm.

In this presentation, I will first address the opportunities as well as the challenges of this computing

paradigm. Against this backdrop, I will describe some of my lab’s recent experimental and theoretical

results on implementing oscillator-based dynamical systems. Specifically, I will present the design

and implementation of oscillator Ising machines (and their extensions) to solve hard combinatorial

optimization problems. I will also discuss the lab’s ongoing efforts in leveraging oscillator dynamics

to design probabilistic computing platforms. Subsequently, I will discuss the lab’s endeavors in

exploring a general framework for designing new physics-inspired computational models and

platforms. Finally, I will conclude by identifying some crucial performance metrics that would need

to be achieved for such systems to become competitive computing platforms in the future, along

with potential pathways to accomplish them.