Mario Miscuglio

Zibo Hu, Shurui Li, Russell L. T. Schwartz et al.

Convolutional neural networks are paramount in image and signal processing including the relevant classification and training tasks alike and constitute for the majority of machine learning compute demand today. With convolution operations being computationally intensive, next generation hardware accelerators need to offer parallelization and algorithmic-hardware homomorphism. Fortunately, diffractive display optics is capable of million-channel parallel data processing at low latency, however, thus far only showed tens of Hertz slow single image and kernel capability, thereby significantly underdelivering from its performance potential. Here, we demonstrate an operation-parallelized high-throughput Fourier optic convolutional neural network accelerator. For the first time simultaneously processing of multiple kernels in Fourier domain enabled by optical diffraction has been achieved alongside with already conventional in the field input parallelism. Additionally, we show an about one hundred times system speed up over existing optical diffraction-based processors and this demonstration rivals performance of modern electronic solutions. Therefore, this system is capable of processing large-scale matrices about ten times faster than state of art electronic systems.

Mario Miscuglio, Volker J. Sorger

With an ongoing trend in computing hardware towards increased heterogeneity, domain-specific co-processors are emerging as alternatives to centralized paradigms. The tensor core unit (TPU) has shown to outperform graphic process units by almost 3-orders of magnitude enabled by higher signal throughout and energy efficiency. In this context, photons bear a number of synergistic physical properties while phase-change materials allow for local nonvolatile mnemonic functionality in these emerging distributed non van-Neumann architectures. While several photonic neural network designs have been explored, a photonic TPU to perform matrix vector multiplication and summation is yet outstanding. Here we introduced an integrated photonics-based TPU by strategically utilizing a) photonic parallelism via wavelength division multiplexing, b) high 2 Peta-operations-per second throughputs enabled by 10s of picosecond-short delays from optoelectronics and compact photonic integrated circuitry, and c) zero power-consuming novel photonic multi-state memories based on phase-change materials featuring vanishing losses in the amorphous state. Combining these physical synergies of material, function, and system, we show that the performance of this 8-bit photonic TPU can be 2-3 orders higher compared to an electrical TPU whilst featuring similar chip areas. This work shows that photonic specialized processors have the potential to augment electronic systems and may perform exceptionally well in network-edge devices in the looming 5G networks and beyond.

Armin Mehrabian, Mario Miscuglio, Yousra Alkabani et al.

Neural Networks (NNs) have become the mainstream technology in the artificial intelligence (AI) renaissance over the past decade. Among different types of neural networks, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely adopted as they have achieved leading results in many fields such as computer vision and speech recognition. This success in part is due to the widespread availability of capable underlying hardware platforms. Applications have always been a driving factor for design of such hardware architectures. Hardware specialization can expose us to novel architectural solutions, which can outperform general purpose computers for tasks at hand. Although different applications demand for different performance measures, they all share speed and energy efficiency as high priorities. Meanwhile, photonics processing has seen a resurgence due to its inherited high speed and low power nature. Here, we investigate the potential of using photonics in CNNs by proposing a CNN accelerator design based on Winograd filtering algorithm. Our evaluation results show that while a photonic accelerator can compete with current-state-of-the-art electronic platforms in terms of both speed and power, it has the potential to improve the energy efficiency by up to three orders of magnitude.