MIT researchers introduce Lightning, a reconfigurable photonic-electronic smartNIC that serves real-time deep neural network inference requests at 100 Gbps. Credit: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL via Midjourney
Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases in computer power are slowing down as the demand grows for high-performance computers that can support increasingly complex artificial intelligence models.
Ghobadi, an associate professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a CSAIL member, and her group colleagues are the first to identify and solve this issue. To accomplish this feat, they combined the speed of photonics and the dataflow control capabilities of electronic computers.Before Lightning, photonic and electronic computing schemes operated independently, speaking different languages.