SAHARA

Summary Faster, lower power, and/or less expensive computation will be a software problem forever. Hardware can only make the challenge simpler or harder and heterogeneous approaches exacerbate it. For emerging alternative computational technologies like quantum, optical, resistive (and other forms of analog computation), and/or biological computing (among others), to be successful, they must be integrated into the existing computational infrastructure (both hardware and software) if they are to realize their full potential. The increasingly main‐stream options that reconfigurable logic represents (both fine and coarse grained) will also be most useful within an infrastructure that is sympathetic to legacy memory and storage models. SAHARA is a reduction of computation into data wavefronts that, independent of the underlying technology, employs memory as the fundamental unit of computation within a simple data‐flow model, essentially turning processing into a side‐effect of the relevant data being made available to the logic that manipulates that data. No single aspect of SAHARA is “new”. Its foundations are more than 50 years old and started with Minsky's 1961 paper on Turing equivalence. SAHARA is an eminently useful abstraction of computation that has the potential of seamlessly integrating many disparate forms of computation behind a simple, common, architectural interface.