Coming soon - A computer on desk capable of doing trillions of calculations per second.

Optical Computing, which is the next milestone in computing where the calculation could be done with the speed of light, the only scope next to current which we have already achieved and now playing with Photon is the only option left.

          Currently or earlier when we used the term Optical computing, it was almost the process where few vendors changed their internal wiring with optical waveguides, and some kind of optical transistor that is controlled by photons instead of electrons. There are also optoelectronic devices, which uses a mix of the two (usually optical interconnects and electronic transistors). However, optoelectronic devices lose 30% of their energy converting electrons into photons and back. This also slows transmission of messages. All-optical computers eliminate the need for optical-electrical-optical (OEO) conversions.

          Optalysys, a UK technology company, says it’s on-target to demonstrate a novel optical computer, which performs calculations at the speed of light, in January 2015. If all goes to plan, Optalysys says its tech — which is really unlike anything you’ve ever heard of before — can put an exascale supercomputer on your desk by 2020. What / how they think? It’s here:

Fig: An Optalysys optical computer, on a desktop

          Moore’s Law states that the numbers of transistors on a chip will double every 2 years, thus resulting the computing power doubling roughly every 18 months. But we are now reaching the limits of transistor technology and Moore’s law is breaking down. Most modern supercomputers were designed for the purpose of simulating nature such as aerodynamic simulations, modeling nuclear reactions, predicting the weather etc. However despite supercomputers embedded with multiple processors working in parallel, each processor still operates in a serial mode i.e., each calculation is performed one after another. Large simulations are based on mathematical processes that do not scale well. Each resulting value in the output is found from a calculation involving every number in the input. Using multiple processors creates significant data management problems as the resolution is increased resulting in smaller and smaller gains in performance.

          Optalysis approaches it differently. To do the same mathematical operation in parallel, it takes advantage of the natural properties of light at the speed of the light. The Optalysis processor works by shining low power laser light through layers of tiny liquid crystal grids. Numerical data is then entered by applying varying voltages to the liquid crystal molecule causing them to change optical density. By modulating the waves of the laser light, as they pass through the liquid crystal layer, we can encode analog numerical data into the beam. As the laser beam leaves the liquid crystal grid, it diffracts forming an interference pattern and a mathematical calculation is performed. The laser can be split to pass through many liquid crystal layers allowing multiple complex calculations to be performed simultaneously before the separate paths are recombined and a snapshot of the result is taken by a digital sensor.

          And, regardless of the size of the calculations, there are none of the data management issues as found in traditional serial processing. This technology can even also help tackle big data challenges by analyzing the massive existing data at high speed. Even the fastest supercomputers can take days, weeks or even months to model real world situations and costs millions a year in electricity.

          Moving away from the technical nitty-gritty, Optalysys’s optical computer is exciting for two main reasons: It consumes very little power, and there’s essentially no limit on how parallel you can make it. There’s no direct analogy to transistor-based logic, but you could almost think of every liquid-crystal pixel as a tiny processing core (or at least a tiny transistor). In a normal computer chip, while there is some parallelism, most things happen very sequentially, with each core (and each transistor) working mostly in serial. In an Optalysis optical computer, the laser beam hits every single pixel at the same time — it essentially performs hundreds or thousands (or millions?) of small computations in parallel, at the speed of light.

          Optalysys says that its technology is already at NASA Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4, meaning it’s ready for full-scale testing in a laboratory environment. By January 2015, Optalysys says it will have a 340-gigaflop prototype ready to go. By 2017, the company wants to have two commercial systems in place: A big data analysis system that will add 1.32 petaflops of grunt to an existing, conventional supercomputer — and a standalone Optical Solver supercomputer, which will start at 9 petaflops. Optalysys thinks its Optical Solver could scale up to 17.1 exaflops by 2020.

          The above proposed model will be one of the most affective achievements by human if it comes to reality and this will be of great help in modeling real world situations which obviously cannot be possible through today’s unusual but tomorrow’s traditional silicon chips.

-Subhash Singh

Business Analyst – IQ System Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.