IBM Aims to Put Supercomputer Power on Chips

NEW YORK — IBM Corp. researchers said Thursday that they have taken a significant step toward putting the power of a massive supercomputer with thousands of processors on a single microchip by using pulses of light instead of copper wires.

Big Blue said it had achieved a "breakthrough" by creating a device for converting electrical signals into light pulses that is 200 micrometers across, about twice the width of a human hair. That is about 1,000 times smaller than any previously demonstrated example of the technology, IBM said.

While commercial applications are likely more than a decade away, researchers said they envision chips with hundreds or thousands of brains or "cores" connected by light.

In comparison, IBM's powerful Austin-designed Cell chip in the Sony PlayStation 3 has nine cores.

The optical technology could mean more efficient supercomputers, complex applications such as climate or protein modeling on a laptop and game machines that create lifelike virtual worlds, said Will Green, the project's lead scientist.

"We're talking about taking the kinds of capabilities that make the Internet possible through fiber-optic communication, but shrinking it down where the distances of transmission are just a few millimeters or centimeters," he said.

Green, who works at an IBM research facility in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., said the technology could appear in commercial products, such as mobile devices with the computing power of present-day supercomputers, in 10 to 15 years.

The optical approach addresses traditional limitations with increasing the number of cores on a chip. Sending information with the new technology is 100 times faster than using wires and uses 10 times less power, IBM said.

IBM published its research Thursday in the journal Optics Express.

The IBM device, called an optical modulator, converts digital information in the form of electric signals on a wire into light pulses. Each time an electrical pulse arrives, the modulator opens, acting like a very fast shutter that allows a laser beam to pass through.

"This is still pretty research-lab stuff," said Roger Kay, president of the Endpoint Technologies Associates research firm. "But of course it opens up the great possibility of faster data rates, cooler execution."

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