Luminous Computing

Luminous Computing is a technology company using photonics to improve the data processing capabilities of artificial intelligence models by attempting to create a supercomputer on a chip that is headquartered in Mountain View, California and was founded in 2018 by Marcus Vincent Gomez, Mitchell Namias, and Michael Gao.

According to the company's CEO, Marcus Vincent Gomez, Luminous Computing is attempting to make a single computer chip to replace the computer power of 3,000 boards equipped with Google's Tensor processing units (TPU).

The founder of Luminous Computing, Mitchell Nahmias, published a scientific article on January 2020 in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics titled "Photonic Multiply-Accumulate Operations for Neural Networks'. This paper categorized the performance of both photonic and electronic hardware used in neural network models using multiply-accumulate operations. Nahmias and other researchers involved in the paper found photonic hardware was significantly better than electronic hardware in terms of energy, speed, and compute density.