General Purpose Parallel Computation on a DNA Substrate

Abstract

In this paper I describe and extend a new DNA computing paradigm introduced in Blumberg for building massively parallel machines in the DNA-computing models described by Adelman, Cai et. al., and Liu et. al. Employing only DNA operations which have been reported as successfully performed, I present an implementation of a Connection Machine, a SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) parallel computer as an illustration of how to apply this approach to building computers in this domain (and as an implicit demonstration of PRAM equivalence). This is followed with a description of how to implement a MIMD (multiple-instruction multiple-data) parallel machine. The implementations described herein differ most from existing models in that they employ explicit communication between processing elements (and hence strands of DNA).