NetCast: Low-Power Edge Computing with Optical Neural Networks via WDM Weight Broadcasting

NetCast is an optical neural network architecture that circumvents constraints on deep neural network (DNN) interface at the edge. Many DNNs have weight matrices that are too large to run on edge processors, leading to limitations on DNN inference at the edge or bandwidth bottlenecks between the edge and server that hosts the DNN. With NetCast, a weight server stores the DNN weight matrix with local memory, modulates the weights onto different spectral channels of an optical carrier, and distributes the weights to one or more clients via optical links. Each client stores the activations, or layer inputs, for the DNN and computes the matrix-vector product of those activations with the weights from the weight server in the optical domain. This multiplication can be performed coherently by interfering the spectrally multiplexed weights with spectrally multiplexed activations or incoherently by modulating the weight signal from the weight server with the activations.