Decades after being replaced with digital platforms, analogue computing has experienced a surging interest following developments in metamaterials and intricate fabrication techniques. Specifically, wave-based analogue computers which impart spatial transformations on an incident wavefront, commensurate with a desired mathematical operation, have gained traction owing to their ability to directly encode the input in its unprocessed form, bypassing analogue-to-digital conversion. While promising, these systems are inherently limited to single-task configurations. Their inability to concurrently perform multiple tasks, or compute in parallel, represents a major hindrance to advancing conceptual mechanical devices with broader computational capabilities. In here, we present a pathway to simultaneously process independent computational tasks within the same architected structure. By breaking time invariance in a set of metasurface building blocks, multiple frequency-shifted beams are self-generated which absorb notable energy amounts from the fundamental signal. The onset of these tunable harmonics enables distinct computational tasks to be assigned to different independent “channels,” effectively allowing an analogue mechanical computer to multitask.

中文翻译：

---

并行机械计算：可以多任务处理的超材料


在被数字平台取代几十年后，随着超材料和复杂制造技术的发展，模拟计算的兴趣激增。具体来说，基于波的模拟计算机在入射波前上传递与所需数学运算相称的空间变换，由于它们能够绕过模数转换，以未处理的形式直接对输入进行编码，因此受到了关注。虽然前景广阔，但这些系统本质上仅限于单任务配置。它们无法同时执行多个任务或并行计算，这是推进具有更广泛计算能力的概念机械设备的主要障碍。在这里，我们提出了一种在同一架构结构中同时处理独立计算任务的途径。通过打破一组超表面构建块中的时间不变性，可以自生成多个频移光束，这些光束从基波信号中吸收了大量能量。这些可调谐谐波的出现使得不同的计算任务能够被分配给不同的独立 “通道” ，从而有效地允许模拟机械计算机进行多任务处理。