LightSolver Study Projects Major Photonic Computing Speedups
Israeli photonic computing company LightSolver and Germany's High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart have published research examining whether optical computing could dramatically accelerate a major category of scientific calculations.
What the study examined
The study focused on sparse systems of linear equations, mathematical problems that appear repeatedly in engineering and scientific simulations.
Researchers compared projected performance from an emulator of LightSolver's Laser Processing Unit, or LPU, with established iterative algorithms running on a GPU.
Depending on the problem and algorithm, the study projected time to solution improvements ranging from approximately 40 times to more than 80,000 times.
Projections, not measurements
That number requires an important qualification.
The comparison used an emulator of the LPU architecture. The figures are therefore projections rather than measured performance from a commercially deployed photonic processor.
The peer reviewed paper, titled “Accelerating Sparse Linear Solvers with an Optical Laser Processing Unit,” was published in the proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers.
About LightSolver
LightSolver was founded in Israel and develops computing systems that use light for selected mathematical operations.
Rather than presenting optical processors as replacements for conventional computing, the company's model envisions CPUs, GPUs and LPUs working together, with each type of processor handling workloads suited to its architecture.
Why it matters
Sparse linear systems are important because they form a computational bottleneck in fields including fluid dynamics, structural engineering, electromagnetics, materials science and other large simulations.
If real hardware can eventually reproduce the projected results while maintaining acceptable accuracy, reliability and cost, specialized photonic accelerators could significantly reduce calculation times for some high performance computing workloads.
That remains an if.
The immediate development is narrower but still significant: an Israeli photonic computing architecture has been evaluated in peer reviewed joint research with a major German supercomputing institution, producing performance projections that warrant further hardware testing.
