New Kind of Computer "Never Crashes" February 15, 2013 2:26 PM
comment(s) - last by System could be useful for mission critical
applications, such as combat robotics Professor Peter Bentley
University College of London and his colleague aren't impressed
with most everyday computers, which aren't very fault tolerant
and can only multitask by flipping their cores between various
sequential instruction streams in a program. He describes in ,
"Even when it feels like your computer is running all your
software at the same time, it is just pretending to do that,
flicking its attention very quickly between each program. Nature
isn't like that. Its processes are distributed, decentralised
and probabilistic. And they are fault tolerant, able to heal
themselves. A computer should be able to do that." So the pair
set out to make a new hardware and a new operating system,
capable of handling tasks differently from most current
machines, which even if "parallel" deal with instructions
sequentially. The new machine has ins