HPC > Silicon Photonics
Can photonics deliver the next breakthrough in research computing?
Photonic computing technologies are seeing rapid growth in research output and technology development, but how will this impact scientists’ and engineers’ research capabilities?
of energy-efficient and ultra-fast parallel processing. Lumai’s optical neural networks can be 1000x faster – and much more sustainable – than existing transistor-based digital electronics.
The funding will support Lumai in building and launching optical neural networks for high-performance computing and machine vision, while simultaneously leading developments in advanced optical technologies. Tim Weil, CEO at Lumai, said: “The
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hotonic technology offers enormous potential advantages to data processing speeds for
large-scale computing infrastructure while also promising to reduce networking and communications energy consumption. This technology has huge ramifications for advanced computing infrastructure, such as supercomputers (HPC and AI), cloud computing, data centre networking and even quantum computing. Performance bottlenecks and energy efficiency are a growing concern for scientists and researchers using HPC and AI systems as they can potentially limit application performance or make large- scale computing unsustainable.
More efficient AI In March 2023, Lumai was awarded a £1.1m Innovate UK Smart Grant to commercialise
26 Scientific Computing World Summer 2023
its work in all-optical network training and deep optics for faster, more efficient computing. Spun out of The University of Oxford
in January 2022, Lumai is developing all-optical neural networks for next- generation AI. It is creating advanced optical computing processors where the information flow and calculations are not dependent on electronic processing. The £1.1m grant was awarded in conjunction with The University of Oxford and follows Lumai’s previous funding from IP Group and Runa Capital. Existing transistor-based digital
electronics are struggling to support the potential offered by AI, especially with the explosive increase of computation demand to support breakthrough AI models such as ChatGPT. To combat this, Lumai’s computing platform is capable
Innovate UK Smart Grant win is a testament to the team’s vision and passion to creating optical computers that are significantly faster and consume less energy than traditional electronics. After spinning out
‘Optical computers… are significantly faster and consume less energy than traditional electronics’
Tim Weil, CEO at Lumai
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