Quantum and Biological Systems

Our industry is in the process of changing our understanding of computational systems. The combination of extreme computational and energy power demand is a key part of modern data centers and runtime platforms. How many calculations can we produce at what energy cost? The limitations are a confluence of material science, system design complexity, and the fundamental laws of physics.

It's about to get weird as we enter the world of quantum and biological systems.

We started with coprocessors, FPGAs, ASICs, GPUs, and DSPs as lowerpower, highperformance custom hardware. We're now seeing the emergence of neural processing units and tensor processing units as well.

But we are on the cusp of enormous shifts in what's possible computationally with the advent of quantum and biological systems. Not every computational element is suitable for every problem, but quantum computing will make some problems impossibly fast to handle. Artificial biological brains will be able to computations, like the human brain, with the power budget of a light bulb.

Come hear how things are already in the process of changing as well as what is likely to come next.

About Brian Sletten

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, AI/ML, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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