System Combines Light And Electrons To Unlock Faster, Greener Computing

Researchers at MIT have developed a new photonic computing system called “Lightning” that can accelerate modern computing and machine learning tasks. The system uses lasers to produce photons which are then used to perform computation operations in the analog domain. The prototype was tested on deep neural networks and was able to complete inference tasks like image recognition and language generation in chatbots. The findings of the research will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM).