Revolutionary Optalysis Optical Computer will reach exaFLOP speeds using desktop liquid displays and low power lasers

As previously mentioned about one week ago, a startup company called Optalysis is trying to invent a fully-optical computer that would be aimed at many of the same tasks for which GPUs are currently used. Amazingly, Optalysis is claiming that they can create an optical solver supercomputer astonishing 17 exaFLOPS machine by 2020. Here we look at the wealth of information provided at the Optalysis website.

Optalysys’ technology applies the principles of diffractive and Fourier optics to calculate the same processor intensive mathematical functions used in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and pattern recognition,” explains founder and CEO Dr. Nick New. “Using low power lasers and high resolution liquid crystal micro-displays, calculations are performed in parallel at the speed of light.”

The company is developing two products: a ‘Big Data’ analysis system and an Optical Solver Supercomputer, both on track for a 2017 launch.

The analysis unit works in tandem with a traditional supercomputer. Initial models will start at 1.32 petaflops and will ramp up to 300 petaflops by 2020.

The Optalysys Optical Solver Supercomputer will initially offer 9 petaflops of compute power, increasing to 17.1 exaflops by 2020.

40 gigaFlops demonstration uses 500×500 pixels working 20 times per second. Each pixel does the work of about 8000 floating point operations in each of the cycles. Speeding up 427 million times to 17.1 exaFLOPS can be done with 500,000 X 500,000 pixels and 8550 cycles per second. They can use multiple LCD displays.

There are soon be $399 4K resolution monitors and are currently available in the $600-700 range. Displays have 60 Hz and 120 Hz speedsbut some have 600 Hz refresh rates. Technologically the refresh can be driven up. There was no need to drive the refresh rate up for human displays but there will be a need for optical computing. 4K monitors usually have 8.3 million pixels (3180X2160). Thirty six thousand 4K monitors would get to 500K X 500 K.

Here are answers on the details of the Optical Computer

The Optalysys technology is pioneering in that it will allow mathematical functions and operations to be performed optically, using low power laser light instead of electricity. These operations may be combined to produce larger functions including pattern recognition and derivatives. Our goal is to provide the step change in computing power that is required in Big Data and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications.

The technology will be in the form of enclosed, compact optical systems which can sit on the desktop and are powered from a normal mains supply. They will be driven from a software wrapper and will feature interfaces to commonly used tools like OpenFOAM and Matlab.

As a co-processor, the technology development will initially focus on interfacing with large simulations and data sets to provide analysis of the data as it is produced, providing new levels of capability in areas where the volume of data is such that detailed analysis is not possible. Looking further ahead the technology will be able to the produce the actual simulation data at speeds and resolutions far beyond the capabilities of traditional computing.

How can the Optalysys technology provide such a big improvement over traditional computing?

They use the natural properties of light travelling through tiny liquid crystal micro display pixels that are thousandths of a millimetre across, to form interference patterns. These patterns are the same as certain mathematical operations, which form the basis of many large processes and simulations that the most powerful processor arrays and supercomputers are made specifically to do. However these processes are fundamentally parallel operations, with each resulting data point in the output resulting from a calculation involving all the data points in the input. However, electronic processing is fundamentally serial, processing one calculation after the other. This results in big data management problems when the resolutions are increased, with improvements in processor speed only resulting in incremental improvements in performance. The Optalysys technology, however, is truly parallel – once the data is loaded into the liquid crystal grids, the processing is done at the speed of light, regardless of the resolution. The Optalysys technology we are developing is highly innovative and we have filed several patents in the process.

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