In a world first, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), a UK public R&D funding agency, will deploy 3D optical inference technology from Oxford based Lumai, the optical compute company building next-generation AI infrastructure.
With concerns about data centre energy usage high on political and industrial agendas, ARIA will onboard Lumai Iris™ inference servers as the first optical inference platform in its Scaling Inference Lab - run by CommonAI CIC, a non-profit organization focused on collaborative AI development. The deployment will enable researchers to evaluate the value of optical compute in a commercial data centre environment, as well as its potential to lower data centre power consumption by 90%. Lumai Iris servers could also cut total cost of ownership to around one-tenth of conventional GPU architectures.
Lumai’s Iris technology runs production-scale large language models (LLMs), and works by carrying out AI computation within beams of light operating in three-dimensional space, rather than just using transistors in a silicon chip. Because numbers are encoded as light intensity and passive optical components, such as lenses, are used for mathematical operations, the computation itself uses a negligible amount of energy, which barely rises as performance scales.
“Power, not demand, now limits how fast AI can be deployed.” said Dr. Xianxin Guo, co-founder and CEO of Lumai. “Running a multi-node system in a commercial data centre is where new compute architectures prove whether they are ready for real deployment. This collaboration at ARIA's Scaling Inference Lab validates our roadmap with a real system operating in a commercial environment.”
ARIA is an independent, UK government-backed funding organization supporting advanced AI and other transformative technologies. Created by an Act of Parliament, and sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, it champions scientists and engineers pursuing ambitious ideas that could lead to major scientific and technological breakthroughs. Particularly those that benefit wider society. Its Scaling Inference Lab exists to stress-test next-generation compute architectures on real workloads in a live commercial setting - using standard power, cooling, and rack integration.
“Lumai’s technology is the most mature optical compute platform we evaluated, and has the potential to make AI inference more energy-efficient and less dependent on constrained global hardware supply chains,” said David Lewis, ARIA’s Chief Science and Technology Officer. “The Scaling Inference Lab provides the means to test that potential openly and independently at rack scale.”
Learn more about Lumai and ARIA
Image courtesy of Lumai