Lessons from Nature for Computing: Looking beyond Moore’s Law with Special Purpose Computing and Co-design

We address computing from three different perspectives: 1) The changing landscapes; 2) Complexity in Nature and algorithms; 3) Lessons for the next era. The paper summarizes the factors shaping conventional technology scaling such as process and materials technology, memory and bandwidth, and energy efficiency in computing. In addition, the fragmentation of applications coupled with new innovations in architectures and algorithms are changing the landscape of computing. A cursory study reveals that computations of realistic systems is still lagging compared to how nature computes reality. In the last section of the paper, using a few examples, we highlight the value of co-design, a framework for application-specific concurrent design of hardware, software, algorithms. Based on our analysis, we point that computing is entering an exciting new era in which specialization of information processing based on applications can imbibe many of the lessons from Nature.