The D6 project highlighted to us that we may want to move in a different direction during senior design. We spent much time researching and developing new techniques for an already existing commercial system that implemented many different tools in creating a larger integrated system. We found that it may be a better use of our resources and more advantageous to research something more specific and for a more novel purpose. We are unsure exactly what we want to work on for senior design, however, we have some general goals and values that we are going to keep in mind. Much of our group is pursuing a career in power systems for the purposes of renewable development, therefore, exploring methods of prioritizing efficiency and sustainability will likely be the guiding post for our senior design project.
In order to decrease carbon emissions, we must both increase the amount of power produced by renewable sources and reduce the amount of power that we are using. Thus, optimization our computational systems would provide a great benefit to lower carbon footprints. A promising preliminary idea is research into methods of creating more efficient computation methods that will decrease power usage. There are multiple considerations to keep in mind:
Through our preliminary research, we have been able to see how randomness can play a key role in increasing computational efficiency, both through hardware and software implementations.
However, if we are able to make our computational methods more efficient, it is likely that our systems would be expected to process far more information, proportional to the higher capacity of these improved systems. Thus, we may not necessarily be optimizing power usage by developing more efficient computational methods. Rather, we may just be creating more time efficient computational methods.
Ultimately, we are not, as individuals, going to be able to control the advancement of computation. It is not a good use of time to worry about the implications of increasing computational efficiency, rather, we could use our intellect to understand the technology used to address this topic, and potentially find new means of implementation that may be able to provide a great benefit to people.
Regardless of the ethical implications, exploring TRNG hardware and its implications is something that is extremely interesting to us. We are going to use this as a starting point for our brainstorming and discuss with our professors and industry professionals in order to fine tune our process. We plan to have a clear idea and plan for Senior Design by the end of the summer.