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Learn more - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and talk to tech insiders -- all free! For full access and benefits, join IEEE as a paying member. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN ComputingTopicTypeNews These Optical Gates Offer Electronic Access Ultrafast optical computing interfaces with traditional circuits Charles Q. Choi 16 Dec 2022 2 min read blue spirals along a green line and red spiral along a green line An optical logic gate based on circularly polarized light (heuristically illustrated here) is made of a material that emits photons with different circular polarization, depending on the chirality of the input beams. Yi Zhang/Aalto University optical computingphotonicschiralitycircular polarizationmolybdenum disulfidenonlinearlogic gates By using light waves that essentially spiral through space like corkscrews, optical logic gates can run 1 million times as fast as their electronic counterparts, advancing the cause for ultrafast light-based computing, a new study finds. It also reveals a new and promising interface between optical computing and conventional electronic computing. Modern electronics build logic gates from transistors to carry out logic operations such as AND, OR, and NOT. To create faster circuits, scientists have long investigated replacing electronic gates with light-based optical devices, says study lead author Yi Zhang at Aalto University, in Finland. These could theoretically operate more quickly, since photons travel at the speed of light, while electrons don't. In the new study, researchers explored using a property of light known as chirality. Light beams can be made to spiral much like threads on a screw, turning either clockwise or counterclockwise in a right- or left-handed circular polarization. (Do a "thumbs up" with your right hand. The direction in which your thumb points, compared with the direction in which your fingers curl, represents a right-circularly polarized wave's corkscrew direction compared with its direction of propagation.) Zhang and his colleagues created a gate from a single layer of molybdenum disulfide--consisting of a sheet of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between two layers of sulfur atoms--placed on top of silica. When the researchers shone two light beams at the gate, the handedness (also known as chirality) of the output beam was determined by the chirality of the input beams. When both input beams had the same chirality, the output was right-handed, but when both input beams had different chirality, the output beam was left-handed. This new device served as one type of logic gate, XNOR. By adding filters or other optical components, the researchers created the remaining other kinds of logic gates, such as AND, OR, NOR, XOR, and NAND. The new gates performed at speeds of less than 100 femtoseconds, which is roughly 1 million times as fast as electronic gates, Zhang says. Moreover, the scientists found they could achieve high-speed electric control of the gates simply by applying a voltage to the molybdenum disulfide. "Traditionally, the connections between electronic and optical computing have mainly been realized through slow and inefficient optical-to-electrical and electrical-to-optical conversion," Zhang says. "We demonstrate electrical control of the chirality optical gates, realizing an exciting prospect for direct interconnection between electrical and optical computing." In addition, the researchers showed that a single device could simultaneously run multiple gates. In contrast, previous electronic and optical gates each typically performed just one logic operation at a time, Zhang notes. These findings suggest that simultaneous multiple chirality logic gates could help build complex multifunctional circuits and networks, he says. In the future, the researchers want to show their chirality logic gates can perform "cascading," an operation that helps build large-scale circuits. Although previous optical gates have faced major difficulties while cascading, Zhang suggests that it theoretically should not be a problem with their devices. Zhang notes that the biggest challenge they face is the very low efficiency of the nonlinear optical effect underlying their gate's operation. "The good news is that there are several new materials reported recently that have high nonlinear conversion efficiency," he says. The scientists detailed their findings 9 December in the journal Science Advances. From Your Site Articles * Quantum Gate 100x Faster Than Quantum Noise > * Photon-Triggered Nanowire Transistors a Step Toward Optical ... > * All-Optical Computing Gets Another Arrow in Its Quiver - IEEE ... > Related Articles Around the Web * Are We Poised to Turn the Optical Computing Corner? - EEJournal > * Here's why we don't have light-based computing just yet ... > optical computingphotonicschiralitycircular polarizationmolybdenum disulfidenonlinearlogic gates Charles Q. Choi Charles Q. Choi is a science reporter who contributes regularly to IEEE Spectrum. He has written for Scientific American, The New York Times, Wired, and Science, among others. The Conversation (1) [defa] John Pigott17 Dec, 2022 SM 100 fs is not a million times faster than electronic logic gates. 0 Replies Hide replies Show More Replies US President Joe Biden walks near Chevy vehicles as he arrives to deliver remarks during a visit to the General Motors Factory ZERO electric vehicle assembly plant in Detroit, Michigan on November 17, 2021. TransportationTopicEnergyTypeAnalysis The EV Transition Explained: Local Policies Shape Global Competition 1h 8 min read A group of gold IEEE Medals on black background. The InstituteTopicTypeNews IEEE Honors Iconic Engineers 16 Dec 2022 3 min read A photo showing an autonomous drone launching itself from a metal box on the side of a highway RoboticsTopicTypeNews Video Friday: No Pilot Needed 16 Dec 2022 2 min read Related Stories SensorsTopicTypeNewsConsumer Electronics New Pixel Sensors Bring Their Own Compute ComputingTopicNewsType Quantum Researchers Discover the AND Gate ComputingTopicTypeNewsTelecommunications Entangled Photons Can Come Out in Webs Now ComputingTopicMagazineTypeFeature Europe Gets an Exascale Supercomputer Germany will host JUPITER, Europe's entry into the exascale realm Michael Dumiak 5h 3 min read This image shows several rows of computer racks, which give off an eerie blue glow. The existing supercomputing resources at the Forschungszentrum Julich, shown here, will soon be augmented by JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer. Sascha Kreklau/Forschungszentrum Julich Frontier, the world's first exascale supercomputer--or at least the first one that's been made public--is coming online soon for general scientific use at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Another such machine, Aurora, is seemingly on track to be completed any day at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Now Europe's getting up to speed. Through a EUR500 million pan-European effort, an exascale supercomputer called JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) will be installed sometime in 2023 at the Forschungszentrum Julich, in Germany. Thomas Lippert, director of the Julich Supercomputing Center, likens the addition of JUPITER, and the expanding supercomputing infrastructure in Europe more broadly, to the construction of an astonishing new telescope. "We will resolve the world much better," he says. The European Union-backed high-performance computing arm, EuroHPC JU, is underwriting half the cost of the new exascale machine. The rest comes from German federal and state sources. Exascale supercomputers can, by definition, surpass an exaflop--more than a quintillion floating-point operations per second. Doing so requires enormous machines. JUPITER will reside in a cavernous new building housing several shipping-container-size water-cooled enclosures. Each of these enclosures will hold a collection of closet-size racks, and each rack will support many individual processing nodes. How many nodes will there be? The numbers for JUPITER aren't yet set, but you can get some idea from JUWELS (shorthand for Julich Wizard for European Leadership Science), a recently upgraded system currently ranking 12th on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. JUPITER will sit close by but in a separate building from JUWELS, which boasts more than 3,500 computing nodes all told. With contracts still out for bid at press time, scientists at the center were keeping schtum on the chip specs for the new machine. Even so, the overall architecture is established, and outsiders can get some hints about what to expect by looking at the other brawny machines at Julich and elsewhere in Europe. JUPITER will rely on GPU-based accelerators alongside a universal cluster module, which will contain CPUs. The planned architecture also includes high-capacity disk and flash storage, along with dedicated backup units and tape systems for archival data storage. The JUWELS supercomputer uses Atos BullSequana X hardware, with AMD EPYC processors and Mellanox HDR InfiniBand interconnects. The most recent EuroHPC-backed supercomputer to come online, Finland-based LUMI (short for Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) uses HPE Cray hardware, AMD EPYC processors, and HPE Slingshot interconnects. LUMI is currently ranked third in the world. If Jupiter follows suit, it may be similar in many respects to Frontier, which hit exascale in May 2022, also using Cray hardware with AMD processors. Harnessing Europe's new supercomputing horsepower "The computing industry looks at these numbers to measure progress, like a very ambitious goal: flying to the moon," says Christian Plessl, a computer scientist at Paderborn University, in Germany. "The hardware side is just one aspect. Another is, How do you make good use of these machines?" Plessl has teamed up with chemist Thomas Kuhne to run atomic-level simulations of both HIV and the spike protein of SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Last May, the duo ran exaflop-scale calculations for their SARS simulation--involving millions of atoms vibrating on a femtosecond timescale--with quantum-chemistry software running on the Perlmutter supercomputer. They exceeded an exaflop because these calculations were done at lower resolutions, of 16 and 32 bits, as opposed to the 64-bit resolution that is the current standard for counting flops. "The computing industry looks at these numbers to measure progress, like a very ambitious goal: flying to the moon." Kuhne is excited by JUPITER and its potential for running even more demanding high-throughput calculations, the kind of calculations that might show how to use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for clean-energy applications. Jose M. Cela at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center says that exascale capabilities are essential for certain combustion simulations, for really-large-scale fluid dynamics, and for planetary simulations that encompass whole climates. Lippert looks forward to a kind of federated supercomputing, where the several European supercomputer centers will use their huge machines in concert, distributing calculations to the appropriate supercomputers via a service hub. Cela says communication speeds between centers aren't fast enough yet to manage this for some problems--a gas-turbine combustion simulation, for example, must be done inside a single machine. But this approach could be useful for certain problems in the life sciences, such as in genetic and protein analysis. The EuroHPC JU's Daniel Opalka says European businesses will also make use of this burgeoning supercomputing infrastructure. Even as supercomputers get faster and larger, they must work harder to be more energy efficient. That's especially important in Europe, which is enduring what may be a long, costly energy crisis. JUPITER will draw 15 megawatts of power during operation. Plans call for it to run on clean energy. With wind turbines getting bigger and better, JUPITER's energy demands could perhaps be met with just a couple of mammoth turbines. And with cooling water circulating among the mighty computing boxes, the hot water that results could be used to heat homes and businesses nearby, as is being done with LUMI in Finland. It's one more way this computing powerhouse will be tailored to the EU's energy realities. From Your Site Articles * Top500: Frontier Still No. 1. Where's China? > * How the World's Most Powerful Supercomputer Inched Toward the Exascale > * The Beating Heart of the World's First Exascale Supercomputer > Related Articles Around the Web * First European 'exascale' supercomputer to be hosted in Germany ... > * The EU enters the exascale era with the announcement of new ... > * DOE Explains...Exascale Computing | Department of Energy > Keep Reading |Show less