Friday, October 16, 2009
The Future of Supercomputers is Optical
An IBM researcher gives a timeline for developing the next generation of supercomputers.
By Katherine Bourzac
This week at the Frontiers in Optics conference in San Jose, Jeffrey Kash
of IBM Research laid out his vision of the future of
supercomputers.
The
fastest supercomputer in the world, the Los Alamos National Laboratory's IBM Roadrunner, can perform 1,000 trillion operations per
second, which computer scientists call the petaflop scale. Getting up to the
next level, the exaflop scale, which is three orders of magnitude faster, will
require integrating more optical components to save on power consumption, Kash
said. (Laser scientists at the conference are also looking towards the
exascale, as I reported on Wednesday.)
Melinda
Rose of photonics.com reported on Kash's
talk, which he stated represented his personal views and not those of IBM:
Because
a 10x increase in performance means the machine will consume double the power,
to make future supercomputers feasible to build and to operate optics will need
to be more widely used he said. In 2008 a 1-petaflop computer cost $150 million
to build and consumes 2.5 MW of power. Using the same technology, by 2020 a 1
exaflop machine would cost $500 million to build and consume 20 MW of power.
Kash
gave a timeline that would find optics replacing electrical backplanes by 2012
and replacing electrical printed circuit boards by 2016. In 2020, optics could
be directly on the chip. In a less aggressive scenario, by 2020 all off-chip
communications need to be optical, he said.
But for that to happen, to get optics up to millions of units in 2010, the
price needs to drop to about $1 per Gb/s, he said. Today, Gb/s processing costs
about $10.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
http://my.technologyreview.com/mytr/social/blog/post.aspx?wuid=100319&bpid=285 is the source of the following.
The book which is the source of the following is the refereed proceedings of the The International Workshop on Optical SuperComputing, OSC 2008, held in Vienna, Austria, August 2008 in conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Unconventional Computation UC 2008.
OCS is a new annual forum for research presentations on all facets of optical computing for solving hard computation tasks. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Design of optical computing devices, electrooptics devices for interacting with optical computing devices, practical implementations, analysis of existing devices and case studies, optical and laser switching technologies, applications and algorithms for optical devices, alpha practical, x-rays and nano-technologies for optical computing.
More details
Optical Supercomputing: First International Workshop, OSC 2008, Vienna, Austria, August 26, 2008, Proceedings
By Shlomi Dolev, Tobias Haist, Mihai Oltean
Contributor Shlomi Dolev
Published by Springer, 2008
ISBN 3540856722, 9783540856726
127 pages
Optical Supercomputing: First ... - Google Book Search (20 May 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=G6ZYwjKh_QcC
http://books.google.com/books?id=G6ZYwjKh_QcC&printsec=frontcover#PPA9,M1 for the following quotation.
Recent Advances in Photonic Devices for Optical Super Computing.
Hossin Abdeldayem, Donald O. Frazier, William K. Witherow, Curtis E. Banks, Benjamin G Penn, and Mark S. Paley , who are all NASA scientists.
Optical supercomputers are seven orders of magnitude faster than current computer speeds. This means that an hour of computation by an optical computing system is the equivalent of more than eleven years by a conventional electronic computer.
Optical computing uses photons instead of electrons to perform appropriate mathematical calculations. In the optical computer of the future, electronic circuits and wires will be replaced by laser diodes, optical fibres, tiny crystals, micro-optical components, and thin films, which will make the systems
more efficient, more cost effective, lighter, and more compact. Optical components would not need insulators, as those needed by electronic components, because they are much less sensitive to cross talk and do not suffer from short circuits. Multiple frequencies of light can travel concurrently through optical components without interference, allowing photonic devices to process multiple streams of data in parallel, with ease.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have built a simple optical computer, demonstrating the feasibility of such a system, which was able to conduct huge computations nearly instantly.
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=196 is the source of the following.
A simple computer that marries the mind-boggling computing power of quantum mechanics with the ease of manipulating light has been built by researchers at the University of Rochester. The device proves that a specific quirk of atoms, which lets scientists conduct huge computations almost instantly, can be perfectly mimicked by light, which is much more practical to control than individual atoms.
The result could be a computer that performs some tasks a billion times faster than today's supercomputers, using relatively simple technology that's already well understood. The research behind the device was revealed at the Lasers and Electro-Optics Quantum Electronics and Laser Science conference in Baltimore, Md.
The device mimics quantum interference, an important property that makes quantum computers exponentially faster at tasks such as breaking encryption codes or searching huge databases. Instead of interference, conventional computers use particles called electrons to perform tasks sequentially, like a librarian looking for a book by inspecting the entire library one volume at a time. Interference essentially allows you to make clones of that librarian-one librarian for every book-and set them all loose at once. The new device proves that using light interference is just as effective as quantum interference in retrieving items from a database.
"There's a big push to explore information processing based on quantum mechanics," says Ian Walmsley, professor of optics at the University of Rochester, who lead the team that invented the device. "You can do things with quantum mechanics that are impossible on classical machines. What we've shown here is that if you have a quantum computer that is based entirely on quantum interference, we can build you a computer that is equally efficient, based entirely on light interference. And light is a whole lot easier to manipulate than quantum systems."
One of the biggest limitations of quantum computers had always been thought to be their need for entanglement-a condition where different particles become linked, sharing many similar properties like the librarian clones sharing similarities with each other. Entanglement is difficult to achieve, and so far it has not been done for more than a few particles at a time. Scientists then found that entanglement may not be necessary for operations such as database searches if quantum interference were used. When Walmsley heard this, he was sure he could build a computer that used light interference instead of subatomic particle interference.
"We wanted to show that the implementations which have been done with quantum computing have an exact analogy that is just as effective in light-based processes," says Walmsley.
Walmsley's device uses a piece of transparent tellurium dioxide called an acousto-optic modulator. This acts as the database by storing the information in the form of acoustic waves. A transducer vibrates against one side of the modulator, sending waves through it much like a stereo speaker would send sound waves through the air. The waves slightly compress some parts of the modulator and slightly expand others, creating a pattern in which the database information resides.
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10/18/2009
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