The power of light: Celebrating UNESCO’s International Day of Light
We don’t normally need a reason to talk about the groundbreaking optics and AI work that Lumai is doing, but when we spotted that UNESCO has an International Day of Light we couldn’t resist the opportunity.
According to UNESCO, the day is a chance to celebrate “the role light plays in science, culture and art, education, and sustainable development, and in fields as diverse as medicine, communications, and energy.”
So, just a small topic then? But hey, it does provide us with the perfect opportunity to bring our own work to light (pun very much intended).
Light has been used in datacentres for many years – mainly for high-speed communications over longer distances within the datacentre, and of course for communication to the datacentres. Now, in a rapidly evolving technology market being driven by AI, light is set to make further inroads and could make all the difference in achieving sustainable development while also meeting surging compute demands.
With AI models being distributed across many accelerators, the required inter-accelerator data rates are increasing and hence there is a lot of development underway to replace short-hop communication with light – even at the chip-to-chip level of communication!
While this will help address data bandwidth issues, it won’t help alleviate the constraints of AI compute based on traditional electronics. GPU and other electronics-based AI accelerators are performance-restricted due to the amount of power consumed and heat produced.
To help meet the ever-increasing performance demand of AI datacentres, Lumai’s groundbreaking AI accelerator uses light to help meet the ever-increasing performance demand of AI datacentres. Our 3D optical processor computes with photons instead of electrons, and delivers ultra-fast parallel processing – far quicker than traditional computing – while also using a fraction of the energy. Through leveraging the power of light, we can realise the potential of next generation AI and build a sustainable solution for generations to come.
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