On-Fiber Photonic Computing
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3626111.3628177.pdf
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961.11 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c67263fbb1920c6cb5e3450ce309dc65
Author(s)
Yang, Mingran
Zhong, Zhizhen
Ghobadi, Manya
Date Issued
November 28, 2023
Publisher
ACM|The 22nd ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks
Citation
Yang, Mingran, Zhong, Zhizhen and Ghobadi, Manya. 2023. "On-Fiber Photonic Computing."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In the 1800s, Charles Babbage envisioned computers as analog devices. However, it was not until 150 years later that a Mechanical Analog Computer was constructed for the US Navy to solve differential equations. With the end of Moore's Law, photonic computing is revitalizing the promise of analog computing by leveraging photons' speed, bandwidth, and energy efficiency for faster, more efficient, and scalable analog computing systems. This paper argues that the networking community should augment pluggable transponders with photonic computing capabilities to enable a backward-compatible solution for in-network computing. We propose on-fiber photonic computing to perform computing operations inside network transponders while the data is in the optical domain. We discuss the components required to enable the seamless integration of computation into the very fabric of optical communication links. We then discuss several use cases of on-fiber photonic computing, including machine learning inference, video encoding, load balancing, and intrusion detection.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3626111.3628177
