Japanese electronics company NEC is optimistic that its new optical chip, capable of transmitting information at speeds up to 25 Gb/s and processing a million trillion calculations per second (1 petaflop = 1,000 teraflops), will help them reclaim their lost ground to IBM.
NEC was once the owner of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, Earth Simulator, from 2002 to 2004. However, the current reigning champion is IBM’s BlueGene, which operates at a speed of 360 teraflops (360 trillion calculations per second), only about one-third of a petaflop.
NEC has developed a VCSEL (Vertical-Cavity Surface Emitting Laser) chip that can convert electrical current into light pulses and transmit them through optical fiber. This innovation helps to minimize the delays typically experienced in copper wire connections. Furthermore, as the distance increases, the intensity of the electrical current decreases more sharply compared to the attenuation of light.
The VCSEL chip is expected to soon be integrated into several high-end applications that require robust processing capabilities. However, this technology will require an additional 10 years before it appears in desktop computer systems. “A transmission speed of 25 Gb/s opens up many development opportunities for supercomputers, but it will still be a long time before it becomes a reality in practical products,” said John Shalf, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States.
Horst Simon, a colleague of Shalf, also noted that there are numerous challenges that will affect the development timeline of next-generation supercomputers: “A petaflop-level system requires at least around 200 terabytes of memory, not to mention the considerable challenges associated with building a power source and cooling technology for such a computer.”
