“It is a rackable solution, an entire supercomputer, and we are building all of the parts of it. “We are building the whole computer,” Gomez says. Rather than just looking at the processor and seeing how photonics can help there, the plan at Luminous now is to build a complete AI supercomputer with its optical technology being the key connection between all the different levels. At a basic level, it’s because you don’t have enough bandwidth going into the chip to feed it anything faster than that.” “It’s mostly doing memory and interface and interconnect. “This is a chip whose sole purpose in life is doing computations and it’s mostly not doing compute,” he says. He estimates about 10 percent to 20 percent of the chip’s time is dedicated to computing. He points to Nvidia’s A100 GPU accelerator, which is optimized for AI workloads. The first thing that we are doing is using optics to make our digital transporter before we go to a brand-new platform to do logic and computation.” But for the modern AI user, the bottleneck is not compute. In 2030, it may very well be important technology for at least edge computing. The computing stuff, it’s a really cool science project. “Compute is not the problem and this is a hard pivot away from what we’ve canonically focused on. “If you look at this work, we are 5X to 10X away from the theoretical density limit of digital,” Gomez tells The Next Platform. That is where the problem lies and that is where optical technology can do the most good, according to Gomez. Soon after the startup raised $9 million in seed money in January 2019 that Luminous made a sharp turn away from the original idea of addressing the compute aspect of AI computing to looking at the communications – between the parts within the chip as well as between systems, racks and datacenters. Using silicon photonics to address those problems was where Gomez’s attention aimed and the subject of research done by Mitchell Nahmias, the other founder at Luminous and now the company’s chief technology officer, during his time doing research at Princeton University and the years since.

The company’s focus was on what Marcus Gomez – one of Luminous’ founders and now its chief executive officer – called optical computing, or using optics to solve the math problems inherent in AI computing. When Luminous Computing was founded in 2018, it was joining the growing list of established tech firms as well as startups that are looking to use silicon photonics to build chips that are faster and more power efficient to support modern artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. It is not every day when we hear about a new supercomputer maker with a new architecture, but it is looking like Luminous Computing, a silicon photonics startup that has been pretty secretive about what it was up to, is going to be throwing its homegrown architecture into the ring.

Luminous computing bill gates