Recently, Dr. Ruti Ben-Shlomi from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel announced that the Laser Processing Unit (LPU) developed by Light Computing Technology has achieved a significant technological breakthrough, enabling the direct mapping of partial differential equations (PDE) to two-dimensional coupled laser arrays. This technology allows the device to solve classical problems, such as the heat equation and Poisson equation, in just a few nanoseconds, with speed improvements of up to one hundred times compared to existing Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) calculators.
展开剩余77%The advantage of this new architecture is that it no longer relies on external memory and statistical sampling, allowing the LPU to scale up to handle 100,000 variables by 2027, with expectations of reaching one million variables by 2029. This technological advancement positions the Laser Processing Unit as a powerful accelerator for scientific discoveries, engineering designKB资产, and computational physics.
The Laser Processing Unit from Light Computing Technology converts users' PDE specifications into laser control instructions through a proprietary compiler, eliminating the need for users to possess specialized knowledge of laser physics. This optical architecture leverages the interference phenomenon between lasers, with each laser acting as an electromagnetic wave interacting with adjacent lasers, encoding the sparse coupling matrices required for the discretization of most PDEs. Since the computations are entirely performed in the optical domain, the execution time for each iteration is almost unaffected by the number of variables, consistently maintained within a few nanoseconds.
MoreoverKB资产, the energy consumption of the LPU is significantly lower than that of GPUs, avoiding the typical memory bandwidth bottlenecks encountered in digital computations. The physical evolution process of each computation represents a deterministic experiment, which means the Laser Processing Unit does not require repeated statistical sampling, further reducing energy consumption.
Light Computing Technology also plans to open an LPU laboratory soon, allowing researchers to use the alpha version of the hardware and its digital simulator, enabling users to verify and optimize their PDE models before full deployment.
At the ACM Frontiers of Computing conference in 2025, the Light Computing Technology team showcased this technology and published a peer-reviewed paper titled "Solving Partial Differential Equations on a Simulated Optical Platform," further validating the effectiveness of their technology. Additionally, Light Computing Technology has partnered with ANSYS to embed the laser PDE solver into its engineering design software, allowing engineers to quickly and efficiently solve complex physical simulation problems.
As the Laser Processing Unit is gradually promotedKB资产, the technological prospects of Light Computing Technology are promising, with the potential to have a profound impact in multiple fields such as fluid dynamics and structural mechanics.
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