The rapid growth of modern computing power may soon reach its limits. Because traditional circuitry requires at least few molecules to exist, the miniaturization required for speed, performance and computing power will reach its limitations as the components of computers continue to shrink. The possibility of a successor to the silicon chip may be found within the same lines of code that program life itself. Biochemists are currently working on ways to use DNA to process and store large amounts of data. Due the high amount of parallelism involved the interactions between DNA and enzymes may soon substantially outperform the fastest supercomputers.
Parallelism is the ability for multiple calculations to occur in a given instance in a computer.
While standard computers are limited to the number of processors contained in the hardware, a test tube filled with DNA fragments and enzymes has all of the molecules exposed to each other at once. This property enables DNA computing the possibility of rapidly searching, sorting and manipulating massive amounts of data in parallel. A typical representation of the computing power of highly parallel computing is represented by the Hamiltonian Path, commonly associated with the traveling salesman problem. The salesman needs to find a path taking him to all of the cities, but he doesn't want to end up going to the same city twice. In order to solve the problem a computer must generate every possible combination of paths and reject those that do not fit the needs of the salesman.