Inference analysis of optical transformers

Xianxin Guo, Chenchen Wang, Djamshid Damry

Keywords: optical computing, transformer models

Abstract: This paper explores the utilization of optical computing for accelerating inference in transformer models, which have demonstrated substantial success in various applications. Optical computing offers ultra-fast computation and ultra-high energy efficiency compared to conventional electronics. Our findings suggest that optical implementation has the potential to achieve a significant 10-100 times improvement in the inference throughput of compute-limited transformer models.

Submission Number: 9