A new way of computing

Researchers from the Univ. of South Florida College of Engineering have proposed a new form of computing that uses circular nanomagnets to solve quadratic optimization problems orders of magnitude faster than that of a conventional computer.

A wide range of application domains can be potentially accelerated through this research such as finding patterns in social media, error-correcting codes to big data and biosciences.

In an article published in Nature Nanotechnology, authors Sanjukta Bhanja, D.K. Karunaratne, Ravi Panchumarthy, Srinath Rajaram and Sudeep Sarkar discuss how their work harnessed the energy-minimization nature of nanomagnetic systems to solve the quadratic optimization problems that arise in computer vision applications, which are computationally expensive.

According to the authors, magnets have been used as computer memory/data storage since as early as 1920; they even made an entry into common hardware terminology like multi-"core." The field of nanomagnetism has recently attracted tremendous attention as it can potentially deliver low-power, high speed and dense non-volatile memories. It is now possible to engineer the size, shape, spacing, orientation and composition of sub-100-nm magnetic structures. This has spurred the exploration of nanomagnets for unconventional computing paradigms.

Molecule self-assembles into flower-shaped crystalline patterns

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $1.2 million to three research groups at Indiana Univ. to advance research on self-assembling molecules and computer-aided design software required to create the next generation of solar cells, circuits, sensors and other technology.

This interdisciplinary team in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Dept. of Chemistry is led by Amar Flood, Steven Tait and Peter Ortoleva in collaboration with Mu-Hyun Baik of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, who previously served at IU.

Designing new materials at the molecular level is a key goal of the U.S. government's Materials Genome Initiative, a project launched in 2011 to reduce the cost, and speed the creation, of these materials. As recipients of funds from the NSF's Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future program, the IU scientists will contribute to this national initiative.

"There are more than 100 million known molecules, but in the vast majority of cases we cannot predict what sort of structure they will form when those molecules start packing together," said Amar Flood, James F. Jackson Professor of Chemistry and Luther Dana Waterman Professor in the IU Bloomington Dept. of Chemistry, who is the principal investigator on the grant. "We want to be able to predict, as well as design, those structures."