Welcome to revcomp.info
A web resource for
Information about
reversible computing technology
This website is being created to host information that is of historical, scientific, and general public interest on the subject of reversible computing.
Reversible computing refers to a type of computational process in which every individual computational operation (as well as an entire larger computation composed of those operations) could potentially be exactly reversed or undone, from a computational perspective, based on locally-available information. In other words, reversible operations do not lose any information about the previous computational state, and reversible computations could in principle be run backwards, recovering their input (initial state) from their output (final state).
The reversible computing paradigm is absolutely required, according to the most fundamental laws of physics, in order for the energy efficiency and affordable performance of computing technology to continue to grow by indefinitely many orders of magnitude over time.
As with past increases in computing efficiency, this future performance growth will be essential for enabling numerous new application areas for computing, and it can be expected that it will account for a correspondingly large amount of future growth in the productivity of our civilization’s entire economy.
Therefore, the long-term economic value that will eventually derive, directly or indirectly, from this technology is almost impossible to overstate—over time, the value added will become many orders of magnitude larger than the entire value of the world economy today.
There is even an argument that, in the very long term, the question of whether all life in the universe will eventually die out or not will depend on whether we continue to ever-more-closely approach perfection of this technology. Thus, pursuing this technology can argued to be essential for saving the universe.
Unfortunately for these far-reaching ambitions, reversible computing, as a field of study, today remains rather obscure, and is badly misunderstood. It is the goal of this website to help disseminate reliable information about the field, to help technologists, decision-makers, and the general public to attain a broader appreciation of its boundless importance.
Information from old websites that is currently hosted on this site includes the following. Other information may be added over time.
· Michael Frank’s public webpage at Sandia National Laboratories, from the period 2015-2024, when he was a senior member of the technical staff at the Center for Computing Research.
· Michael Frank’s old personal homepage from the period 1999-2004, when he was faculty at the University of Florida’s CISE Department.
o This includes links to a number of reversible computing related materials, including the content that Mike produced during the period 1996-1999, when he was in the Reversible Computing Project that was active at MIT at the time.
· The website of the Reversible and Quantum Computing Research group that was managed by Dr. Frank when he was at UF.
o This contains many more reversible computing related research materials which were produced during the period 1999-2004, when Dr. Frank was at UF.
Links to some other relevant websites on the subject of reversible computing.
· Michael Frank’s personal homepage from when he was in the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering’s ECE Department, from 2004-2015 (off and on).
o This includes another list of publications.
o Also, the most recent (2006) slide decks from Mike’s Physical Limits of Computing course.
Page created 7/27/17.