Some insights into implementing computing with light at the speed of light
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- Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 15:10:23 -0700 (PDT)
Here are some insights into implementing computing with light
computation processors. Please read this entire text from top to
bottom.
Optical supercomputers pack 11 years of computation into 1 hour.
The book which is the source of the following is the refereed
proceedings of the The International Workshop on Optical
SuperComputing, OSC 2008, held in Vienna, Austria, August 2008 in
conjunction with the 7th International Conference on Unconventional
Computation UC 2008.
OCS is a new annual forum for research presentations on all facets of
optical computing for solving hard computation tasks. Topics of
interest include, but are not limited to: Design of optical computing
devices, electrooptics devices for interacting with optical computing
devices, practical implementations, analysis of existing devices and
case studies, optical and laser switching technologies, applications
and algorithms for optical devices, alpha practical, x-rays and nano-
technologies for optical computing.
More details
Optical Supercomputing: First International Workshop, OSC 2008,
Vienna, Austria, August 26, 2008, Proceedings
By Shlomi Dolev, Tobias Haist, Mihai Oltean
Contributor Shlomi Dolev
Published by Springer, 2008
ISBN 3540856722, 9783540856726
127 pages
Optical Supercomputing: First ... - Google Book Search (20 May 2009)
http://books.google.com/books?id=G6ZYwjKh_QcC
http://books.google.com/books?id=G6ZYwjKh_QcC&printsec=frontcover#PPA9,M1
for the following quotation.
Recent Advances in Photonic Devices for Optical Super Computing.
Hossin Abdeldayem, Donald O. Frazier, William K. Witherow, Curtis E.
Banks, Benjamin G Penn, and Mark S. Paley , who are all NASA
scientists.
Optical supercomputers are seven orders of magnitude faster than
current computer speeds. This means that an hour of computation by an
optical computing system is the equivalent of more than eleven years
by a conventional electronic computer.
Optical computing uses photons instead of electrons to perform
appropriate mathematical calculations. In the optical computer of the
future, electronic circuits and wires will be replaced by laser
diodes, optical fibres, tiny crystals, micro-optical components, and
thin films, which will make the systems
more efficient, more cost effective, lighter, and more compact.
Optical components would not need insulators, as those needed by
electronic components, because they are much less sensitive to cross
talk and do not suffer from short circuits. Multiple frequencies of
light can travel concurrently through optical components without
interference, allowing photonic devices to process multiple streams of
data in parallel, with ease.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have built a simple optical
computer, demonstrating the feasibility of such a system, which was
able to conduct huge computations nearly instantly.
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=196
A simple computer that marries the mind-boggling computing power of
quantum mechanics with the ease of manipulating light has been built
by researchers at the University of Rochester. The device proves that
a specific quirk of atoms, which lets scientists conduct huge
computations almost instantly, can be perfectly mimicked by light,
which is much more practical to control than individual atoms.
The result could be a computer that performs some tasks a billion
times faster than today's supercomputers, using relatively simple
technology that's already well understood. The research behind the
device was revealed at the Lasers and Electro-Optics Quantum
Electronics and Laser Science conference in Baltimore, Md.
The device mimics quantum interference, an important property that
makes quantum computers exponentially faster at tasks such as breaking
encryption codes or searching huge databases. Instead of interference,
conventional computers use particles called electrons to perform tasks
sequentially, like a librarian looking for a book by inspecting the
entire library one volume at a time. Interference essentially allows
you to make clones of that librarian-one librarian for every book-and
set them all loose at once. The new device proves that using light
interference is just as effective as quantum interference in
retrieving items from a database.
"There's a big push to explore information processing based on quantum
mechanics," says Ian Walmsley, professor of optics at the University
of Rochester, who lead the team that invented the device. "You can do
things with quantum mechanics that are impossible on classical
machines. What we've shown here is that if you have a quantum computer
that is based entirely on quantum interference, we can build you a
computer that is equally efficient, based entirely on light
interference. And light is a whole lot easier to manipulate than
quantum systems."
One of the biggest limitations of quantum computers had always been
thought to be their need for entanglement-a condition where different
particles become linked, sharing many similar properties like the
librarian clones sharing similarities with each other. Entanglement is
difficult to achieve, and so far it has not been done for more than a
few particles at a time. Scientists then found that entanglement may
not be necessary for operations such as database searches if quantum
interference were used. When Walmsley heard this, he was sure he could
build a computer that used light interference instead of subatomic
particle interference.
"We wanted to show that the implementations which have been done with
quantum computing have an exact analogy that is just as effective in
light-based processes," says Walmsley.
Walmsley's device uses a piece of transparent tellurium dioxide called
an acousto-optic modulator. This acts as the database by storing the
information in the form of acoustic waves. A transducer vibrates
against one side of the modulator, sending waves through it much like
a stereo speaker would send sound waves through the air. The waves
slightly compress some parts of the modulator and slightly expand
others, creating a pattern in which the database information resides.
To search the database, Walmsley directs a beam of light toward the
modulator. The light is first split into two, with one part traveling
through a prism so that a rainbow of different frequencies of light
shines on the modulator. Each frequency shines through a different
compressed or expanded part of the tellurium dioxide, which bends that
frequency of light the way a straw appears bent when sticking out of a
glass of water. The rainbow of frequencies is then recombined into a
single beam. By mixing the new beam with the original beam that
entered the device, a single frequency will emerge as having been
altered by its trip through the database.
So in the case of Walmsley's device, 50 different frequencies of light
shine through the modulator, and if the 20th frequency is the altered
one, then Walmsley knows that the bit of information he was searching
for is located at position 20 in the database. A conventional computer
would have had to check 20 times to find the location. If the database
in question were the Manhattan phone book, the search for a single
phone number could take a conventional computer several million
searches, while a light-based device could pinpoint the number in just
one.
What makes the device particularly attractive is that it is so simple
in comparison to quantum computers. Engineers have had decades of
experience precisely manipulating light and all the concepts in the
device are based on well-known, 19th-century classical physics-though
as Walmsley points out, the technology to carry out the experiment
only became available in the last 10 years. "In effect, we are
leveraging new physics on the back of optical technology; a synergy
that is particularly easy at Rochester, and illustrates the close
links between basic science and engineering."
The research was funded by Department of Defense through the Center
for Quantum Information. Other researchers involved in the work were:
graduate student Pablo Londero and postdoctoral students Christophe
Dorrer, Sascha Wallentowitz, and Konrad Banaszek.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=computing-with-light
Large quantum computers could in principle handle some of the toughest
computing problems, such as factoring numbers to break encrypted
messages--answering those questions in seconds instead of the
centuries that today's computers would require. But quantum computers
are extraordinarily difficult to build; they rely on exquisitely
controlled interactions among fragile quantum states. Do they have to?
Recently Ian A. Walmsley and his co-workers at the University of
Rochester demonstrated that ordinary, classical light waves can
perform as efficiently as one class of quantum computer.
The Rochester experiment searched a sorted 50-element database. An
ordinary computer doing a binary search of such a database would need
to query the database six times (enough to search 64 elements: 26 =
64). In 1997 Lov K. Grover of Bell Laboratories proved that a quantum
computer only has to query once, no matter how large the database.
Programmable Optical Arithmetic Logic Unit + Optical Associative
Processing
We could all have optical processors in our laptops! Technology has
advanced and the time has come!
Programmable Optical Arithmetic Logic Unit
http://www.google.com/patents?id=sMYlAAAAEBAJ
Background of the Invention.
USA Patent Number 5249144
The invention relates generally to optical information processing,
and, in particular, to an optical crossbar apparatus for performing
parallel optical logic and arithmetic operations and including
programmable residue arithmetic functions.
There is a fundamental difference between optical circuits, in which
the information carriers are photons, and electronic circuits, where
the carriers are electrons. In the former case, the carriers do not
interact with each other, while in the latter they do. This means that
in optical devices, there exist interconnect possibilities that do not
exist with electronic hardware, in particular, interconnected parallel
architectures which permit digital arithmetic and logic operations to
be performed in a completely parallel, single step process. After the
inputs are switched on, the output appears in the time it takes a
photon to transit the device. No faster computation time is possible
A programmable optical arithmetic/logic device employs a first and
second plurality of positionally encoded optical light paths. For
arithmetic operations, these light paths represent residue numbers.
The arithmetic/logic device includes first and second reordering units
which are responsive to a third and fourth plurality of light sources
serving to select one of a plurality of arithmetic or logic operations
to be performed by the arithmetic/logic device. The arithmetic/logic
device further employs an optical arithmetic/logic unit which is
identically constructed for all of the selectable arithmetic/logic
operations and which implements an optical table look-up function to
obtain the desired output. Finally, the arithmetic/logic device used
an output reordering device to reorder the output of the arithmetic/
logic unit depending upon the originally selected arithmetic/logic
operation. For arithmetic operations, the final output is provided as
an output residue number representation.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/5221v26378452855/
An optical content-addressable parallel processor for fast searching
and retrieving
Book Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 0302-9743 (Print) 1611-3349 (Online)
Volume Volume 505/1991
Book PARLE '91 Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe
DOI 10.1007/BFb0035091
Copyright 1991
ISBN 978-3-540-54151-6
Category Submitted Presentations
DOI 10.1007/BFb0035114
Pages 338-354
Subject Collection Computer Science
SpringerLink Date Monday, April 10, 2006
Ahmed Louri1
(1) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University
of Arizona, 85721 Tucson, Arizona
Abstract
Associative processing based on content-addressable memories has been
argued to be the natural solution for non-numerical information
processing applications. Unfortunately, the implementation
requirements of these architectures using conventional electronic
technology have been very cost prohibitive, and therefore associative
processors have not been realized. Instead, software methods that
emulate the behavior of associative processing have been promoted and
mapped onto conventional location-addressable systems. This however,
does not bring about the natural parallelism of associative
processing, namely the ability to access many data words
simultaneously.
The inherently parallel nature and high speed of optics, combined with
the recent technological advancements in optical logic, storage and
interconnect devices are raising hopes for practical realization of
highly parallel optical computing systems. This paper presents the
principles of designing an optical content-addressable parallel
processor, called OCAPP, for the efficient support of high speed
symbolic computing. The architecture is designed to fully exploit the
parallelism an high speed of optics. Several parallel algorithms are
mapped onto OCAPP in bit-parallel as well as word-parallel fashion,
resulting in efficient symbolic algorithms with execution times
dependent only on the precision of the operands and not on the problem
size. This makes OCAPP very suitable for applications where the number
of data sets to be operated on is high e.g., massively parallel
processing. A preliminary optical implementation of the architecture
using currently available optical components is also presented.
This research was supported by an NSF Grant No. MIP-8909216.
.
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