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IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in using pulses of light to accelerate data transfer between chips, something they say could boost the performance of supercomputers by more than a thousand times.

The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, integrates electrical and optical modules on a single piece of silicon, allowing electrical signals created at the transistor level to be converted into pulses of light that allow chips to communicate at faster speeds, said Will Green, silicon photonics research scientist at IBM.

The technology could lead to massive advances in the power of supercomputers, according to IBM. Today's fastest supercomputers top out at around 2 petaflops, or two thousand trillion calculations per second.

The photonics technology could boost that to a million trillion calculations per second, or an exaflop, helping IBM to achieve its goal of building an exascale computer by 2020, Green said.

"In an exascale system, interconnects have to be able to push exabytes per second across the network," Green said. "This is an interesting milestone for system builders [who are] looking at building ... exascale systems in 10 years."

Networkworld has the details HERE!