Software stack for an analog mesh computer: the case of a nanophotonic PDE accelerator

Abstract

The slowing of Moore's Law is forcing the computer industry to embrace domain-specific hardware, which must be coupled with general-purpose traditional systems. This architecture is most useful when large compute power is needed. Among the most compute-intensive applications is the simulation of physical sciences. To maximize productivity in this domain, a variety accelerators have been proposed; however, the analog mesh computer has consistently been proven to require the shortest time-to-solution when targeted toward the Poisson equation. Recent advances in material science have increased the flexibility of the analog mesh computer, positioning it well for future heterogeneous computing systems. However, for the analog mesh computer to gain widespread acceptance, a software stack is required to enable seamless integration with a classical computer. Here, we introduce a software stack designed for the class of analog mesh computers that efficiently generates mesh mappings of a physical problem by enabling users to describe their problem in terms of boundary conditions and mesh parameters. Experiments on a specific implementation of analog mesh computer, the nanophotonic partial differential equation accelerator, show that this stack enables problem-to-mesh scalability expected by the scientific community.