Silicon Nanophotonics will usher in a completely new age of computing and power applications that we've only seen on Star Trek (image: IBM)
The universe has a funny way of playing karma tricks on us writers that follow the tech industry and dare to make sweeping prognostications about future trends.
For example, yesterday, my ZDNet Storage Bits blogging colleague Robin Harris wrote that the industry may have hit the wall in terms of increasing computing performance.
Then on the same day my employer, IBM, pulled the rug out from under him. Sorry Robin. It happens to the best of us. Seriously, I feel for you man.
The funny thing about Moore's Law is that every single time the industry calls for its inevitable demise, the Gods of Technology come and knock you on your ass. When we think we've pushed lithography and compacting transistors to their absolute limit, an advance in technology allows the trend to continue as it always has been.
This time, however, instead of just proving itself consistently correct, Moore's Law is going to have to be completely re-written -- instead of microprocessor technology doubling its performance every two years, we'll be looking forward to ten to twenty fold increases in computational power, at a bare minimum, every five years.
This increase in performance is so significant that the math itself is mind-boggling and it becomes difficult to actually relate to it in conventional terms, or even express it in a quantifiable fashion that makes sense to information technology practitioners outside of very high-end scientific research.
Today, advances in microprocessors are built on the premise of cramming as many transistors onto a piece of silicon as possible. Over the last four decades, we've continued to advance processing power by using different lithography techniques that allow semiconductors to be manufactured in densities of continually decreasing nanometers in width.
Robin may indeed be correct that we may have hit the wall with this approach and advances using conventional microprocessor design may only result in very small incremental improvements. Eleven nanometers may be the practical limit as to how small we can go before we hit the physical limits of what can be done using current semiconductor technology.
However, what IBM showed to the public on December 1, 2010 changes the game dramatically, especially for supercomputing applications. Eventually, these advances will filter down to the enterprise systems and even consumers.
Artist's conception of the future application of photonic routing elements onto a silicon wafer (IBM)
This technology -- with a name pulled seemingly right out of Star Trek is called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics.
Without getting too intergalactic and too technical of a description of how it actually works, it is essentially the fusion of optical technology with semiconductor technology. Instead of using semiconductor pathways to route data and for the processor interconnects, light pulses are being used instead, using components called Silicon Nanoscale Photonic and Electronic Transceivers, or SNIPERS.
To put all of this techno-jargon in the proper perspective, one must understand what is currently the benchmark for most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Tianhe-1A.
This powerful Chinese supercomputer has achieved 2.67 Petaflop/s or 2.67 quadrillion floating point operations, per second.
This is so amazingly fast that it realizes the kind of scientific research and advanced simulation that only 10 years ago could only exist in a computer scientist's wet dreams. But the Tianhe-1A uses strictly conventional computer technology, assembled from over 14,000 Intel Xeon 5670-series x86 processors and 7,000 nVidia Tesla GPUs using a custom high-speed interconnect network that operates at 160Gbps per second.
But compared to future nanophotonics-based systems, assessing the legacy performance of the Tianhe-1A will be like comparing the top speed of a Segway personal transport to that of a Bugatti Veyron. Or an X-15.
The first application of IBM's nanophoton