CHAPTER 214: NEW DESIGNS

"Rina also created a molecular playground that allows you to play with complex molecular interactions," said Nora.

Looking at the screen, he found an icon with a picture of a water molecule on it. He pressed it, and the screen shrunk down to the size of a smartphone and moved down to sit just in front of the keyboard.

In its place, several new screens appeared along with one water molecule.

He spent the next several hours playing with the new app Rina had created.

He could hand-assemble and disassemble molecules, and the app would display the energy released or required for each change in molecular bond.

If he staged a set of atoms or molecules, he could press play and watch the molecules interact.

At one point he reached up to scratch his face and was surprised to find something obstructing his hand. The goggles were so comfortable that he’d forgotten they were there!

By the time he was done, he had hand-assembled a CRISPR molecule, a short DNA strand and watched the crisper molecule edit the DNA strand.

"How did you do this?" he asked Rina. "I thought this type of simulation was too computationally intensive to run in real-time."

"But it’s not running in real-time," she said.

"You know what I mean," he said. "Fast enough to keep up with human perception."

"That’s not-" started Rina.

"Rina," said Nora, in a firm tone.

Rina huffed, then said, "Fine. As to your question, I created a specialized processor to handle molecular simulations. It has a massive number of small cores, and each core handles a single atom."

"How many atoms can it handle at once?"

"One billion. I’m working on redesigning the cores so each core can handle several atoms. My goal is to run a simulation of a couple hundred trillion atoms at speeds fast enough to avoid human wait time."

"Why did you switch to lots of small cores? What was wrong with existing CPU designs?"

"With the Cerebras, I was encountering data flow bottlenecks. Each core could theoretically handle several hundred atoms, but the amount of data that had to flow between cores meant the effective limit was closer to two or three atoms."

"So, you shrunk the cores so you could get more of them, and thus limit the amount of data that had to flow between each?"

"Yes. I’m working on improving the inter-core communication design so each core can handle more than one atom."

He turned to Madison. "Weren’t you complaining about some kind of bottleneck in the Cerebras that limited how fast your neural nets could run? Why not do what Rina did, but for neural nets instead of atoms?"

Madison turned to glare at Rina, while saying, "That’s an excellent idea, Jack. If only Rina had told me about her work sooner, I could have stopped wasting my time on optimizing my code for the Cerebras."

"Sounds like it’s time to start holding daily standups," said Nora.

He’d been reluctant to think about himself as a manager. He just wanted to focus on learning about genetics, and non-business interactions with his girlfriends, but he had to admit, Nora was right.

"Yes. I think you’re right," he said. "I’ve been stopping by this office regularly to see how things are going, but it’s been informal. A short daily meeting where everyone can share what they are working on and status sounds like a good idea."

He thought about it for a moment, then asked, "I’m thinking about scheduling the meeting for here, in this office, mid-morning every non-physical day."

"Why here?" asked Madison.

"Because you three are always here first thing in the morning. And as distracted as you get, I figure if I schedule the meeting in a different room, I’d probably have to come get you every time. So, just meeting here seems easier."

"Yeah, you’re probably right."

Something Madison had said suddenly popped into his head.

"By the way, I think I remember you talking about something called a gate array?"

"FPGA?"

"Yes, that’s it. Didn’t you say it was like re-configurable hardware or something?"

"Yes, it’s like a grid of transistors where you can alter the inter-transistor connectivity. It’s very flexible, but the downside is that it has a much lower overall clock rate."

"Can you combine that idea with Rina’s many small cores idea? Make the cores even smaller, but put them in a programmable matrix so several can work together on harder problems."

Madison looked at Rina.

Rina looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "It’s worth considering. I might be able to make it work for both molecular simulations and neural networks. It wouldn’t be as fast as a custom ASIC, but it would be much more useful, especially on edge devices that require greater flexibility."

"Great. So you have two new designs to work on, one that’s like your molecular simulator, but for Madison’s AI work, and one that is like a super FPGA that can do both."

Rina nodded.

"What about fabricators for the new displays? And what about these gloves? Can they be manufactured with existing technology?"

"We’ve got the display fabricator design mostly figured out and are just working out the kinks. As for the gloves, they also require a special fabricator that uses nanites as part of the process."

"So what are the chances that a competitor would be able to replicate the displays or the gloves?"

Compared to the big tech companies like AntHill, BallSoft, and Yoctoly, Horizon was an ant. If any of those companies wanted to steal their secret-sauce, they could.

Jack could protect their designs with patents, but that would do him no good if the big tech companies could just pressure Horizon’s suppliers, or make tweaks to the patented designs and then manufacture their own competing devices.

His only solution was to release a product with technologies his competitors couldn’t reproduce even if the designs were open-source.

But to do that, he needed to make sure the secret-sauce stayed secret.

"That shouldn’t be a problem," said Rina. "For the displays, the key component of the display fabricator cannot be created with current technologies. Even if our competitors got ahold of one, they would be unable to re-create one."

"But just in case, we are designing it so that if it’s removed from the fabricator, or the fabricator is moved, it disintegrates," said Nora.

"And we won’t install the key component until after the fabricator has been delivered to the factory," added Madison.

"Okay, what about the gloves?"