RC’05: The First Int’l. Workshop on
Reversible Computing
A Key Challenge for 21st Century Computing
http://www.eng.fsu.edu/~mpf/CF05/RC05.htm
a
special
session at
ACM Computing Frontiers 2005 (CF’05)
http://www.computingfrontiers.org
Left to right: Dan Miller, ?, Henry Baker, Tom Toffoli, Lev Levitin, Mike Frank, Joyce & Ed Fredkin, Nick Mehta, Sarah Frost, Erik Forsberg, Erik DeBenedictis, Marios Papaefthymiou, and (front, seated) Kyle Wheeler. (Email me with corrections.) Some more photos (from Kyle Wheeler of Notre Dame) can be found here and here.
Raw digital computing performance per unit of power consumption cannot improve for very many orders of magnitude beyond present levels, unless we can develop computing technologies that dissipate arbitrarily small fractions of signal energies (and generate arbitrarily little new entropy) with each logic operation performed. Although it has never been proven to be impossible to approach the limit of thermodynamically reversible operation in practical machines, skepticism and misconceptions regarding this subject abound, and will probably persist until complete, concrete, and competitive reversible computing systems have been built and demonstrated.
This workshop will attempt to gather together leading experts in the field of reversible computing, to identify and discuss the important open technical problems in reversible computing, while also addressing the social, political and educational issues that threaten to prevent the practical realization of reversible computing within our lifetimes. The goal of the discussion will be to reach a consensus regarding what concrete steps we researchers should take in the near future to help the field overcome these barriers.
The session will begin with a short introductory tutorial on reversible computing, continue with paper presentations (with emphasis on new technological developments and important high-level issues), and conclude with a panel discussion framed to debate the key issues, and attain a group consensus, together with a plan for further action.
Paper submissions are due by the CF ’05 conference’s extended deadline of Dec. 20, 2004. See the CF ’05 website (link above) for additional instructions for authors. Accepted papers will be published in the CF’05 proceedings. The length limit is 6,000 words. Until further notice, submissions to this session should also be emailed to the session organizer, Michael P. Frank (mpf@eng.fsu.edu).
Session Organizer:
Co-organizers:
·
Sarah
Frost, Notre Dame (USA )
Tentative
list of speakers & attendees (as of 11/18/04) includes:
·
Dmitri Averin, SUNY Stonybrook (
·
Henry Baker, Baker Capital (
·
Charles
H. Bennett, IBM (USA )
·
Erik
DeBenedictis, Sandia Nat’l Lab (USA )
·
Erik Forsberg, KTH (
·
Edward
Fredkin, CMU West (USA )
·
Dan
Miller, CMU West (USA )
·
Wolfgang
Porod, Notre Dame (USA )
·
Yvan
Van Rentergem, Ghent (Belgium )
·
Vasili Semenov, SUNY Stonybrook (
·
Tommasso Toffoli,
·
Paul Vitanyi, CWI (
· Alexis De Vos, Ghent (Belgium)
·
Colin Williams, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (
Additional
invited speakers include:
·
Norman Margolus, MIT (
·
Craig Lent, Notre Dame (
· Lars Svensson, Chalmers (Sweden)
Program
committee members:
·
Cristian Calude, U.
·
Konstantin Likharev, SUNY (
·
Tommaso Toffoli,
Topics
include:
·
Theoretical foundations
·
Reversible logic networks
·
Reversible processor architectures
·
Physics of reversible device implementations
·
Clocking, synchronization, and energy recovery
issues
·
Systems engineering for reversible computing
·
Technical objections to reversible computing,
and answers to them
·
Cultural barriers to reversible computing