Nathan Newman, a senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability, is part of a team recently selected by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to improve supercomputing facilities. Supercomputing facilities are clusters of high-powered computers that enable information gathering, storing and analysis on massive scales and are increasingly used by governments, economies, health care services, power and transportation systems, and national security operations.

Because current technologies would require a great amount of electrical power in order to meet this growing demand, a paradigm shift in operations is needed. Newman’s research team is utilizing the latest superconducting materials to develop a new kind of digital circuit, one that can potentially lead supercomputer systems to require much less energy. His group’s work recently resulted in the development of a computer memory device that could enable supercomputing systems to operate as much as 50 times faster and perform 50 times the number of operations while using 50 times less energy.