Energy Minimization Computing using Field Coupled Computing with Nanomagnets
Comparison of quality of the nano-magnet solution with respect to traditional software based solutions
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCF 0829838. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Sudeep Sarkar
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Sanjukta Bhanja
Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering
Javier Puleico
PhD, 2011 now at BSNL
Anita Kumari
PhD, 2011
Ravi Panchumarthy
PhD Candidate, 2011
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The primary focus of our effort is to explore the possibility of directly solving a subclass of quadratic optimization problems with nanomagnets, by harnessing the energy minimization aspects of its operation.
Goal
Background
The primary focus of our effort is to explore the possibility of directly solving a subclass of quadratic optimization problems with nanomagnets, by harnessing the energy minimization aspects of its operation.
Driven by needs for very dense storage (HDD) and memory devices (MRAM), there have been tremendous advances in fabrication methods for patterning magnetic media at nanoscales. It is now possible to create magnets below 100nm dimensions. Such magnets can be fairly well approximated by single magnetic domain models. By exploiting geometric and material anisotropy, one can construct nanomagnet that have two stable magnetic arrangements, which can be used to represent 0 and 1, or in the absence of asymmetry a continuous state representation. The size of the nanomagnets in such devices are limited not by technology, but by the need to isolate the devices from each other. This dipolar interaction between neighboring magnetic devices can be exploited for computing. So far, there have been suggestions for using them in Boolean logic based computing.
We are investigating how to harness the energy minimizing aspect of magnetic operations to directly solve quadratic optimization problems. We call this Magnetic Field-based Computing (MFC); it uses an interacting system of single-domain nanomagnets. Since nano-devices will be associated with high error rates, both at fabrication and during operations, it makes sense to consider error-tolerant applications, where the cost of failure of not finding the optimal solution is not high; even solutions that are close to optimal ones suffices in practice. One such context is in quadratic optimization that arises in object recognition problems in computer vision. Unlike logic and arithmetic computing tasks that demand exact computations, vision problems can work with near optimal solutions. These vision problems place high demand on computational resources (on Boolean logic based computing platforms).
