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All issuesVolume 327, Issue 2IT NewsTechnology

Laser-Based Compute Promises To Light The Way To Faster Physics Sims

The Next Platform, Friday, June 13th, 2025

While the world continues to fixate on AI, there are still plenty of high performance computing workloads that need doing and a speedup to any one part can have a big impact, whether it be computational fluid dynamics, material analysis, or something else.

'Today we're making great progress with HPC with shared memory, message passing, and GPUs,' Ansys chief technology officer Prith Banerjee told The Next Platform in a recent interview.

But as the engineering challenges grow larger, and the tolerances tighter, companies like Ansys continue to explore alternative technologies, including generative AI, machine learning, and even quantum processing units, to speed things up.

These technologies won't replace conventional compute but rather augment them in the same way GPUs have been used to offload specific tasks from CPUs. One of the latest technologies Ansys is playing with is a laser-based compute platform from Israeli startup LightSolver.

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