LightOn Optical Processing Unit: Scaling-up AI and HPC with a Non von Neumann co-processor

2021/07/25 by Brossollet, Charles, Cappelli, Alessandro, Carron, Igor +14 · 1 citation
#Emerging Technologies (cs.ET) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2107.11814

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".

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