New IBM Chip Technology to Power Exascale Computing

IMB’s researchers have discovered a chip technology called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics. “Our CMOS Integrated Nanophotonics breakthrough promises unprecedented increases in silicon chip function and performance via ubiquitous low-power optical communications between racks, modules, chips or even within a single chip itself,” said Dr. Yurii A. Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research. “The next step in this advancement is to establishing manufacturability of this process in a commercial foundry using IBM deeply scaled CMOS processes.” With this technology, IBM scientists are hopeful that the chip will be able to do exascale computing. That’s a million trillion calculations per second. The current world’s fastest supercomputer can compute at 2.507 petaflops. To put that into perspective, a teraflop is a trillion calculations per second. A petaflop is 1000 times that. An exaflop is 1000 times a petaflop. Yeah, that’s a lot. That’s one quintillion calculations per second. This technology, if developed and put on the market, will no doubt have a gigantic impact in the industry. I, for one, am excited to see what’s in store.