Technology | The holy grail of computing

In a corner of the Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE) building inside the serene, leafy environs of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, is a Raman spectroscopy lab—the most silent working space you could ever imagine. Here, acoustic noise is reduced to something lower than a whisper, that is, less than 30 decibels, so that sensitive measurements, like probing the properties of an individual molecule, can be carried out. It’s in this place that a breakthrough, one that promises to place India on the global map of computing inventions, was achieved recently. The invention was of a new device—a computing accelerator—that processes data not in the conventional way a microprocessor—the brain of a computer—does. But closer to how an actual human brain would do.