Communications of the ACM
Building Living, Breathing Supercomputers
The circuit researchers have created for a model bio-supercomputer looks a bit like a road map.
Credit: Till Korten
The substance that provides energy to all the cells in the human body, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers. That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Dan Nicolau, Sr., the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe.
They describe their work in "Parallel Computation with Molecular-Motor-Propelled Agents in Nanofabricated Networks," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which details a model of a biological computer they created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way as massive electronic supercomputers.
Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current supercomputers, uses much less energy, and uses proteins present in all living cells to function.
"We've managed to create a very complex network in a very small area," says Nicolau, with a laugh. He began working on the idea with his son, Dan Jr., more than a decade ago, and was then joined by colleagues from Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, some seven years ago. "This started as a back of an envelope idea, after too much rum I think, with drawings of what looked like small worms exploring mazes."
First Step
The model bio-supercomputer that the Nicolaus (father and son) and their colleagues have created came about thanks to a combination of geometrical modelling and engineering knowhow (on the nanoscale). It is a first step, in showing that this kind of biological supercomputer can actually work.
The circuit the researchers have created looks a bit like a road map of a busy and very organized city as seen from a plane. Just as in a city, cars and trucks of different sizes, powered by motors of different kinds, navigate through channels that have been created for them, consuming the fuel they need to keep moving.
But in the case of the biocomputer, the city is a chip measuring about 1.5 cm square in which channels have been etched. Instead of the electrons that are propelled by an electrical charge and move around within a traditional microchip, short strings of proteins (which the researchers call biological agents) travel around the circuit in a controlled way, their movements powered by ATP, the chemical that is, in some ways, the juice of life for everything from plants to politicians.
More Sustainable
Because it is run by biological agents, and as a result hardly heats up at all, the model bio-supercomputer that the researchers have developed uses far less energy than standard electronic supercomputers do, making it more sustainable. Traditional supercomputers use so much electricity, that they heat up a lot and then need to be cooled down, often requiring their own power plant to function.
Although the model bio supercomputer was able to very efficiently tackle a complex classical mathematical problem by using parallel computing of the kind used by supercomputers, the researchers recognize that there is still a lot of work ahead to move from the model they have created to a full-scale functional computer.
"This would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and hard work of Professor Linke, who is also co-corresponding author, and his group, Professor Månsson and his group — both from Sweden, Professor Diez and his group from Germany, and Dr. Van Delft from Philips, the Netherlands," Nicolau says. "Now that this model exists as a way of successfully dealing with a single problem, there are going to be many others who will follow up and try to push it further, using different biological agents, for example,"
"It's hard to say how soon it will be before we see a full scale bio super-computer," Nicolau says. "One option for dealing with larger and more complex problems may be to combine our device with a conventional computer to form a hybrid device. Right now we're working on a variety of ways to push the research further."
What was once the stuff of science fiction, is now just science.
The PNAS article is co-authored by Dan V. Nicolau, Jr., Mercy Lardc, Till Kortend, Falco C. M. J. M. van Delft, Malin Perssong, Elina Bengtssong, Alf Månssong, Stefan Diezd, Heiner Linkec, and Dan V. Nicolau.
This research was funded by: The European Union Seventh Framework Programme; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; by NanoLund; by the Miller Foundation; by the Swedish Research Council; The Carl Trygger Foundation, German Research Foundation within the Cluster of Excellence Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden and the Heisenberg Program; and by Linnaeus University.
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