The future of computing - new architectures and new technologies. 2. Parallelism and information

For Part 1, see ibid., p. 61-65 (April 2002). The worlds of biology and physics both provide massive parallelism that can be exploited to speed up lengthy computations - with profound consequences for both everyday computing and cryptography. This article explores these possibilities and then, drawing also on material from Part 1, sketches what developments we may expect to see in the next few decades of computing technology.