Accelerating ML models and NP-hard optimisation problems using light
Francesca R. Parmigiani, Hitesh Ballani, G. Brennan, Burcu Canakci, Jiaqi Chu, James Clegg, Daniel Cletheroe, Christos Gkantsidis, Jannes Gladrow, Kirill P. Kalinin, Douglas J. Kelly, H. Kremer, Greg O’Shea, L. Pickup, Babak Rahmani, Antony I.T. Rowstron · 2024
With Moore’s law plateauing and digital specialization approaching its ultimate limit, digital computing faces scalability, performance, and sustainability challenges, calling out for non-traditional compute paradigms. Our novel computer leverages optical and analog technologies and hardware-application codesign to accelerate ML inference and combinatorial optimization, achieving over 100x efficiency improvement in TOPS/Watt.