3.3 Biological Computer Core

The Biocore is a direct outgrowth of bioneural gelpack technology. Each core is essentially a large 'brain', consisting of highly interconnected synthetic neurons suspended in a nutrient gel. Data input and output are handled by specialized optical data fiber connections, interfacing with axon links directly into the core. Approximately 350 clusters of neural tissue exist within the core itself, each acting as a small computer, enabling parallel processing to be done on a vast scale; of course, parallel processing occurs in each cluster, on down to the tens of neurons scale. This is what primarily gives the core its great speed and power.

Memory is in the form of bacteriorhodopsin-based holographic film memory. Each individual film can store 5 gigaquads of data, and are only 2 millimeters thick; there is over 5000 plates of data in each biocore. Access and retrieval is achieved by XUV-band phaseonium laser pulses, and fed into the biocore by electron-feed axon grafts.