Experts champion 'unreliable computing'

Nanotech circuit designs will boost production yield and reduce prices

HP's so-called 'unreliable computing' circuit design will allow nanotechnology-based computing to replace today's semiconductors and will become pervasive in the coming decade, analysts have predicted.

Martin Reynolds, a vice president at Gartner's Dataquest organisation, welcomed HP's recent announcement that it has developed nanotechnology circuit designs that use a cross-bar architecture which accommodates faults in the circuits thereby boosting production yield and reducing prices.

"The HP research highlights an emerging and welcome trend that will become pervasive in the coming decade: the movement toward what Gartner calls 'unreliable computing'," said Reynolds.

"This seemingly paradoxical term refers to the ability to assemble devices that do not always function correctly into entirely reliable systems through redundancy and self-correcting designs. This philosophy will extend from the smallest devices to the largest systems."

According to Reynolds, the value of HP's manufacturing approach lies in its ability to produce 10 or even 100 times as many unreliable devices as reliable ones.

The overhead required to create a reliable system from unreliable building blocks is high, perhaps consuming a quarter of the devices, but the overall system will be "dramatically more capable" than systems built using a conventional architecture.

Gartner predicts that the architecture will be an essential tool for manufacturers of smaller devices, helping to achieve the continuing price and performance improvements predicted by Moore's Law.

However, the analyst firm noted that 'unreliable computing' also applies to large systems. Google, for example, uses low-cost components to assemble a very large computing infrastructure.

Gartner estimates that this approach allows Google to deliver resources at one-tenth the cost of a typical server infrastructure.

Enterprises are advised to recognise that 'unreliable computing', whether at the circuit or server level, will become pervasive throughout IT architectures in the coming decade.