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New Optical Chip Claims 8 Trillion Operations/sec.
Richard Finney writes "Lenslet is announcing
the 'World's First Commercial Optical Processor.'. Reuters has the story here. The Inquirer has a cool graphic here on it. The processor is specified to run at a speed of 8 Tera (8,000 Giga) operations per second, one thousand times faster than any known DSP. When Lenslet releases its Enlight processor in a matter of weeks, a unit using the technology will be 1.7 centimetres high and measure 15 by 15 centimetres."
It can't handle 8192 Giga Operations per second?
There's a nice picture of the processor here
would you be able to link this in a Beowulf-type manner?
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Interstingly, optical processors aren't faster because light is faster than electricity. They are faster because they have much faster rise and fall times between digital on and digital off.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Israeli Processor Computes at Speed of Light
Wed October 29, 2003 05:03 AM ET
By Tova Cohen
HERZLIYA, Israel (Reuters) - An Israeli start-up has developed a processor that uses optics instead of silicon, enabling it to compute at the speed of light, the company said.
Lenslet said its processor will enable new capabilities in homeland security and military, multimedia and communications applications.
"Optical processing is a strategic competitive advantage for nations and companies," said Avner Halperin, vice president for business development at Lenslet.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."
An optical processor is a digital signal processor (DSP) with an optical accelerator attached to it that enables it to perform functions at very high speeds.
"It is an acceleration of 20 years in the development of digital hardware," Lenslet founder and Chief Executive Officer Aviram Sariel told Reuters.
The processor performs 8 trillion operations per second, equivalent to a super-computer and 1,000 times faster than standard processors, with 256 lasers performing computations at light speed.
It is geared toward such applications as high resolution radar, electronic warfare, luggage screening at airports, video compression, weather forecasting and cellular base stations.
Lenslet said its Enlight processor, unveiled at the MILCOM exhibition in Boston this month, is the first commercially available optical DSP.
"Optics is the future of every information device," said Sariel.
Jim Tully, vice president and chief of research for semiconductors and emerging technologies at Gartner Inc, said most companies working with optics focus on switching optical signals for telecommunications rather than processing information optically.
"I'm not aware of any company that has taken it to the extent of processing optically," he said.
Lenslet has raised $27.5 million so far from such investors as Goldman Sachs, Walden VC, Germany's Star Ventures and Chicago-based JK&B Capital.
PALM PILOT SIZE
The company's prototype is fairly large and bulky but when Lenslet begins to supply the processor in a few months it will be shrunk to 15 x 15 cm with a height of 1.7 cm, roughly the size of a Palm Pilot.
"In five years we plan to shrink it to a single chip," project manager Asaf Schlezinger said.
Tully said one issue is whether this technology can be produced in volume the way silicon chips are made.
"Because semiconductor manufacturing technology is well developed, you can produce millions at quite low cost," said Tully, who is not familiar with Enlight.
Lenslet said its processor will be competitive in price with a multi DSP board.
Sariel is negotiating joint projects with companies and/or government agencies in the United States, Europe and Japan to produce the processor for specific applications. It already has projects signed with Israel's Defense Ministry.
"We don't rule out licensing our technology to others," Sariel said. "We are looking at a virtual production line where production is done by others and we provide testing equipment."
Tully said semiconductor companies are working on technology that would use optical channels inside a chip to allow very high speed communication from one part of a chip to another.
"It's conceivable this technology could become mainstream inside chips in 10 years time," Tully said.
(C) Copyright Reuters 2003. All rights reserved. Any copying, re-publication or re-distribution of Reuters content or of any content used on this site, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without prior written consent of Reuters.
This innovative new product will enable revolutionary, new applications in the fields of defense, homeland security, multimedia and communications. The exhibition being held at The World Trade Center, continues until October 15th, 2003.
The fact that...
1. its at the WTC
2. they mention defense and homeland security
3. its immensely powerful
...makes me question whether or not this is going to be available to end users.
besides the lack of a huge marketing campaign.
Anyone know anything different?
Get paid to code OSS
Optical processors have incredible potential. And if you think that's good, just wait. The combo of an optical processor with optical memory is a one-two punch.
But if you want to get the full speed out of your processor and memory, as I recall, all the buses must be optical as well.
Otherwise you're limited by silicon and PCB boards again...
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Nope, you needn't worry. You'll still finish well before the computer does.
"the world's first commercial optical digital signal processor"
When I read the lead post, I thought it was an actual processor like on a PC motherboard... not a DSP. These aren't the same things are they? The possible applications listed on the press release seem to be entirely communications oriented. (ie. fiber optics)
Now a NAND gate using only optics (not electro-optics) would be fantastic. Maybe using some sort of wave interference to generate the logic table... and as you know you can build all of the other logic gates from a NAND!
Why does it matter how large it is, as long as it's not ridiculous? Think about how much empty space there is in your box right now, would a processor that's maybe two or three times the size of current processors REALLY be that big of a deal?
What sort of environment would this sort of device need in order to operate? Glancing at the picture I looks like the device internals need to be very precisely aligned to work. How does it react to vibration? Temperature? Phase of the moon (kidding)? Would a regular CEV style environment be sufficent or does it require uber-protection?
Just curious...
Prismatic
Optical
Refractive
Nacell
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I don't care if it fills my room, and I have to sleep on top of it in the 30cm space between it and the ceiling. I'd still take it.
My patent states:It's all there in black and white.
I appreciate that it's a great demonstration of new technology, but maybe it's a little premature to call this a new commercial chip. It sounds to me like a demonstration of a research project or an exposition of things to come.
It's quite possible that I'm completely ignorant about this, but to whom do they expect to sell the latest and greatest THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE increase in memory bottleneck?
Exactly what operations were performed?
The "vector matrix" multiply is attractive to a lot of people.
But I doubt this includes fetching data, storing results in memory. And the operations might be more like one-bit XOR's than general Level 3 BLAS.
Need more information...
"Provided by the management for your protection."
here is a mirror of that pic, cuz that site is already slashdotted by now.
g
http://www.stuwo.net/temp/i_products_enlight.jp
http://www.stuwo.net/temp/i_products_enlight.jpg
Ummm because the company is in Israel, a country that has to deal with terrorist type attacks on a daily basis? I thought the same question till I saw
"...said Major-General (Ret.) Isaac Ben- Israel, former head of the R&D Directorate of the Israeli Ministry of Defense."
What else is the former head of the R&D Directorate of the Israeli Ministry of Defense going to say about a new chip like this one?
Quantitive leaps like this aren't too significant as regards encryption, and it's certainly nowhere near "infinite processing power".
Assuming this new optical chip is 1000 time faster than existing chips, that would mean I need to add a whole 10 bits to my key to make a brute force attack as hard as it is now. If you make a chip one million times faster, I'll just add another 10 bits.
and of course this at instance was not likely to have been the first since this was something that was textbook knowledge at that time--fourier processing of signals could be done optically. his was just a particularly advance version, doing more advanced matrix multiples in 2-D.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's a DSP, not a CPU.
Stream comes in one end, chip does some magical shit to it, stream comes out the other end..
Like your mp3 player - raw data goes in one end of the DSP, gets decoded into audio, then sent off to the D/A converter for your listening pleasure.
So this can handle larger/faster streams and do more to them.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This is NOT a Harvard architecture part - this isn't fetching instructions from RAM and executing them, like a regular DSP would.
Think of this more like an FPGA - you have a device that is configured for a specific processing algorithm, and data is fed in at wire rate and processed at wire rate.
An example of how a device like this might be used may be in order:
I'm trying to find a radar pulse buried in the noise coming in from my receiver. I want to know the phase delay of the radar pulse - how long from when I sent it till I got it back.
Now, I know what my radar pulse looks like as it goes out. I know that any reflection is going to consist of versions of that pulse shape, delayed and of varying strengths. So what I do is called a correlation - the easiest way to think of this is to imagine having 2 transparencies, one of my outgoing pulse, and one of the incoming signal. Now, I hold them up to the light, and slide the incoming signal across the reference pulse until things match up - that's the point of maximum correlation, and that give me the delay of the signal.
A real correlation function is a bit more complicated as you have to allow for the signal level to be changed - if I am looking for a signal of N samples in a received data stream of M samples, I have to do M*N multiply and add operations to get my correlation. Now, for a radar signal I might be sampling at over a billion samples a second, and looking for a chirp of a 100 ns would give me over 100 billion MAC operations a second. There are ways to do that with conventional DSPs, but they are a galloping BITCH to do (you basically make a cluster of DSPs, and each DSP takes a part of the signal. Synchronising that is a bitch.)
This device would work by having the shape of the outbound pulse represented in the structure of the device itself, and the MACs are done by taking the incoming data stream and projecting it on the structure - thus you do all your processing in parallel, and at wire speed. You get a pulse out when the incoming signal matched the signal you ar looking for.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... at the Lenslet page, the unit actually has several components. The VMM (vector matrix multiplier) does 8000 MAC (matrix array calculations) but there is a VPU (vector processing unit) that comes in at 128 Giga-ops and which would be the bottleneck in the whole setup. No question this is a huge improvement BUT to put it in perspective, it is a DSP only, not a computer system (although some neural network weenies might see a way of turning this into something more than just a DSP). In any case, the bottlenecks will come from the equipment it has to operate with both onboard and off.
Still, note that it's developed with Matlab. Now surely that is the Holy Grail of research, a bitchin' language with an awesome tailored processor. Imagine the logo Matlab [Lenslet Inside].
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I'm not quite sure you understand what this processor is, and how it works. This is *NOT* like a Pentium with a faster clockspeed. This is a signal processing chip which, rather than really executing code, uses a series of optical filters to do massively expensive mathematical operations. This has the following set of properties:
The original poster was right, this IS the future, at least for now
Cheers,
Justin
Disclaimer: I'm one semester away from my bachelors in Physics
I think the answer to that is the wonderfully quantum "It depends".
Option 1 - Digital Optical - simply measures whether the optical source is on or off
Option 2 - Analog Optical - measures whether the optical source is on or off, and also measures the intensity, say to 50 distinct levels.
Option 3 - Pretty Optical - as well as on, off and intensity, also measures emitted colour as an extra set of data bits.
I've no idea if Option 3 is practical/practicable, but all three sound pretty feasible, to say the least.
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
Seriously though, basically this chip can do very quickly what the SETI@Home software does on PCs. Fast fourier transforms and the like... Think about completing a calculation unit every 30 seconds instead of 8 hours and 40 minutes. That is the ball park. I wonder if the precision will be the same.
The shift from electronic to optical results in a massive reduction in the time it take to change states, to the point where it possible to, once again, build a CPU from relatively widely spaced modular optical components. You can build a single optical CPU spread over a motherboard or even cabinet sized area and it will still be several magnitude times faster than the fastest silicon/electronic single chip CPU.
No one but the biggest companies are going to have the capital nessary to collect and shrink the resulting designs down into single optical chip hardware and manufacture the result, with a further magnitude increase in performance. As with the existing CPU industry, it is likely that the market could maintain only a few such CPU companies. Opening up the design and development process, as with open source development, would result is a far more rapid pace of development. Relative obsolescence woul;d insure that there would plenty of opertunity for large profits for the large and small manufactures.
Optical, derived from the ancient Greek word optikos, literally means "the focal power to perceive fair Helena while she is sunbathing nude in yonder olive grove." That's eye power to you and me, dude.
Some critics will say that a major drawback in these new systems is the need for a mechanized eyedropper next to the chip, keeping the core moist and supple at all times. You don't want this chip going red-eye on you during mission critical tasks.
Still, modders are going to go wild. Within minutes, you can change the color of your CPU's iris using the very same dramatic contact lenses worn by today's biggest infomercial stars.
Unfortunately, if you're into porn, excessive downloading can make your computer go blind. That's why I'll be recommending to my porn-intensive clients that they stay on Wintel systems.
Option 1: Digital doesn't mean 0 or 1. Or on or off. That's be binary. Digital just says "in steps, not continuous". At least that's what most dictionaries say.
Option 2: According to above mentioned definition that's still be digital - as long as the "50 distinct levels" are here. If measures the intensity continuously that'd be analog.
Correct me if I am completely wrong but that's what most of the dictionaries and encyclopedias I used say..
What I meant was a computer that used both electricity and light. From what I understand, the first electric computer used electric relays like the ones used in phones (cheaper than vaccum tubes whch had only been invented the same years as the germans began building the machine) and was described as being an electronic computer. When ENIAC was built using vacuum tubes, it was described as being a digital computer. What ever word you want to use to designate that the computer functions using electricity and transistors instead of light is up to you at this point.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
HAH!!! I found the post I lost in my browser cache!!! Now you can read and enjoy it.
Sorry if I came off snide. I didn't mean too. I took your comment to be snide and responded a little harshly. I will be much more civil.
Here's a better and longer explanation of what I said before.
With the present theory of computing (electronic and optical) you have a clock that drives the processor. Actions that take place such as moves, adds, rotates, and multiplies all take place because of an enabling clock pulse. There are bits that will be set on or off that are read and written at the clock pulse. For any digital computer, there must be on and off thresholds - above a certain threshold is on, and below a certain threshold is off - in between is not used and possibly an error.
With your degree, I'm sure you know all this.
Once a bit is set, that is a voltage applied or a light turned on, there is a certain amount of wait time until that signal propogates and can be read. The slope of the voltage vs time plot is rather shallow compared to a light intensity vs time plot. So in order to be reasonably sure that all bits your enabled have reached the threshold will take longer for an electronic signal than for an optical signal. This is why overclockers often increase the voltage on their cpu's, to decrease the time it takes for the signal to reach the threshold value. However, since the intensity of light increases much faster (the packet is tigher) the clock can be set at a MUCH faster rate and still maintain good assurance that all signals have reached their threshold value.
Hopefully this better explains what I said before. You can only imagine if I had tried to type that all into my original post!
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I'm not saying that I think this thing is dumb, I just don't see how they can call this a commercial application. Guiding missles isn't something I shop for at Walmart. It's surely a useful research tool (like I previously mentioned) and apparently useful for military applications, but I'm still left wondering what type of commercial application this thing would serve. If you'd like to read a great article that explains this, check out: EE Times Story from 2001.
It mentions this is very useful for "fast Fourier transforms/inverse fast Fourier transforms (FFTs)/(IFFTs), discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete Fourier transform (DFT), compression, vector-matrix multiplication, equalization and correlation". ALl of these are very useful for processing communications signals such as in cell phones or high-quality recievers (HDTV in rural areas?).
It also mentions that the optical light is modulated at 10 GhZ frame rate (but remember, this is quite parallel processing) and no ordinary computer we have today could possibly crunch 10 billion FFTs in a second. So the terrahertz number is mostly them just stacking it against existing computers.
Cheers,
Justin
You can build both digital and analog computers from analog components. Indeed, aside from "ideal switches", I'd argue that most circuit components are analog. The poster to which you responded is correct -- a system built around discrete levels selected from a continuous domain is considered digital. A system built around continuous levels is considered analog.
So, if you build a computer around 4-level signaling, it'd still be digital. Each signal corresponds to a "digit," likely valued 0 thru 3. If you built a differential-equation analyser out of op-amps, resistors, capacitors and inductors to represent the derivatives/integrals in your system of equations, and operated it within the linear region of the op-amps, you'd have an analog computer. Those aren't very popular anymore, nor have they been for some time.
The options you suggested a couple posts up are all variants of digital signaling. The first one is binary signaling. The second one is discrete amplitude modulation. The third one is multi-frequency discrete amplitude modulation.
The real question is, can you build large numbers of sufficiently small gates for a given signaling method? Additionally, do those gates aggregate into computing structures we know how to use effectively?
Related side topic: 3-valued logic (ternary computing) likely won't take off until its proponents have good answers for both questions. Something tells me the circuits and the gates are the smaller of the two problems. The change in programming paradigm is too big.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
The mainframe world has had optical interconnects for some time now; I saw Amdahl machines so arranged around 5 years ago or so.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
These things are NOT NEW. in 1985 I was a Jet Propulsion laboratory. A caltech professor there was using a light modulator to perform convolution matrix a operations to decode synthetic aperature radar data. THe design is identical.
I was a tech in Emmet Leith's "Radar and Optics" lab at the UofMich and one of the first things I did was run an optical processor using essentially this hack - again to process synthetic aperture radar data. This was in 1967.
Multi-megapixel 2-D FFT plus some geometry corrections in the time it took the laser light to go from the input film plane to the output film plane - about 6 feet on that device.
We were already considering how to replace the photographic film input and output devices with electronic substitutes in those days, too. The size of the device we used was large only because it was convenient to construct it with aluminum U-beams and stock lasers, lenses, and lens holders. Given decent I/O, making a disk-drive sized model, say to do realtime processing in an aircraft-mounted radar, would have been trivial. (The signals to be processed were already electronic and at reasonable bandwidth - lower than a TV image.)
Nowadays this is done by DSPs. Why? Because they're adequately fast and are FLEXIBLE. Optic processors do only one type of computation, and require physical adjustment to tune the parameters. If you can do that computation on something more general-purpose, as fast as your data arrives, why bother building something larger and more limited to do it faster?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way