UK tech company Optalysys is currently developing a prototype optical supercomputer that will perform computations at the speed-of-light, making it the fastest in the world.

Based in West Yorkshire, Optalysys will introduce its speed-of-light optical supercomputer called the "Optical Solver" by January 2015.

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Optalysys is optimistic it'll be able to preview its prototype speed of light optical computer in 2015 and by 2017, build two commercial demonstration systems.

The company said a standalone Optical Solver supercomputer should be able to start a 9 petaflops then scale up to 17.1 exaflops by 2020.

As of the moment, Optalysys' optical computing technology is set for full-scale lab tests since it's already met NASA's Technology Readiness Level 4.

The tech company's technique, while providing powerful computing capabilities, runs on very little power.

Optalysys said that when the world's most powerful supercomputer, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China, runs at its maximum power of 33.86 petaflops per second, it requires electricity that costs US$21 million per year.

It said its speed of light computer could only use about US$3,500 worth of electricity annually.

The term optical computing generally refers to machines that replace electricity with light to perform many of its tasks, according to Digital Trends. It can, however, encompass various types kinds of technologies.

Optalysys is using a massive liquid crystal grid and low-power lasers to build its new light speed computer, an approach very much different from most of other rival optical-based models.

Optalysys said its results have been promising so far. It intends to use the computer to cope with "Big Data."

While very complex, the company's system shoots low-power lasers onto a liquid crystal grid, stirring responses inside the grid. The method generates advanced algorithms that can perform thousands or even millions of computations at once.

Optalysys said it can significantly increase the processing power and capacity of its new machine by using numerous grids simultaneously, either in parallel or in a sequence.

A single petaflop, or one billion floating-point operations per second, is a measure of a computer's performance. It's useful in fields where scientific calculations heavily use floating-point computations.

The floating point calculations describes a method of representing an approximation of a real number of figure is a method that could support a wide range of values.

TagsSupercomputer, computer, Tech, technology, Development, Big Data