Supercomputers that consist of thousands of individual processors connected by miles of copper wires might one day fit into a laptop. And instead of using enough power to light up hundreds of homes, future supercomputers on a chip would require only the energy of a light bulb. So says IBM.
Big Blue is reporting a big breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses. The breakthrough entails a new development for a technology known in the industry as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, which converts electrical signals into light.
The IBM modulator is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than similar modulators, paving the way for many such devices to be integrated onto a single chip.
Core Communications
"Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today's on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload," Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, said in a statement.
IBM said that its breakthrough could significantly reduce cost, energy, and heat while increasing communications bandwidth between the cores more than a hundred times over wired chips.
Big Blue's optical modulator performs the function of converting a digital  electrical signal carried on a wire into a series of light pulses carried on a silicon nanophotonic waveguide. First, an input laser beam is delivered to the optical modulator, which acts as a very fast "shutter" that controls whether the input laser is blocked or transmitted to the output waveguide.
When a digital electrical pulse arrives from a computer core to the modulator, a short pulse of light is allowed to pass through at the optical output. In this way, the device "modulates" the intensity of the input laser beam, and the modulator converts a stream of digital bits (ones and zeroes) from electrical signals into light pulses.
Practical Applications
The concept of building supercomputers with optical technology that shrinks a supercomputing solution into a much tinier footprint than anyone ever imagined has some profound implications for the environment and cost structures, according to Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research.
King said that taking supercomputing to the mobile level could enable portable high-performance computing environments in the field. Supercomputer laptops could be used for anything from oil field geological testing to cutting-edge defense applications.
"Every once in a while we hear people talking about the future of Moore's Law. It's a great reminder that processors are obviously a very important part of the overall solution, but they are only one part," King concluded. "A solution is made up of many parts. It's cool to see how a development in optical networking can signal a wholesale change in the way people approach computing."
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