LightOn Optical Processing Unit: Scaling-up AI and HPC with a Non von Neumann co-processor
Hardware Architecture
2022-12-28 v1 Emerging Technologies
Abstract
We introduce LightOn's Optical Processing Unit (OPU), the first photonic AI accelerator chip available on the market for at-scale Non von Neumann computations, reaching 1500 TeraOPS. It relies on a combination of free-space optics with off-the-shelf components, together with a software API allowing a seamless integration within Python-based processing pipelines. We discuss a variety of use cases and hybrid network architectures, with the OPU used in combination of CPU/GPU, and draw a pathway towards "optical advantage".
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.11814,
title = {LightOn Optical Processing Unit: Scaling-up AI and HPC with a Non von Neumann co-processor},
author = {Charles Brossollet and Alessandro Cappelli and Igor Carron and Charidimos Chaintoutis and Amélie Chatelain and Laurent Daudet and Sylvain Gigan and Daniel Hesslow and Florent Krzakala and Julien Launay and Safa Mokaadi and Fabien Moreau and Kilian Müller and Ruben Ohana and Gustave Pariente and Iacopo Poli and Elena Tommasone},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.11814},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Proceedings IEEE Hot Chips 33, 2021