They are specifically targeting CFD applications, and so the cited FLOPs count might be misleading (but I don't know enough about optical computing to say for s

They are specifically targeting CFD applications, and so the cited FLOPs count might be misleading (but I don't know enough about optical computing to say for sure) I will comment on why I think this is so. If this tool can perform very fast fourier transforms then it will benefit many simulation codes which rely on an approximation technique known as spectral approximation. In that case the huge FLOP/s count will only be realized in "high orders," that is when these spectral methods are pushed to their limits - in which case much existing research today breaks down and the methods can simply become unusable by e.g. yielding a 'theoretically' invertible matrix that has a numerically infinite condition number; no amount of fourier transforms can dig you out of that hole. This problem is not fully understood in the spectral method literature, and it rears its face in many different ways depending on the problem context. GPUs have a similar problem, their ability to churn out dense linear algebra operations at high scale is so good that the vast majority of algorithms have a huge memory bottleneck, not a FLOP/s bottleneck. The result is people rarely see the insane promised 100X speedup of their simulation codes because they rarely are one massive dense linear algebra operation such as a matrix-matrix multiply, but rather a combination of small dense linear algebra ops + memory bound operations like gathers and scatters. Ironically spectral methods also work very well on the GPU in high orders, because they effectively replace memory bound operations with dense linear algebra operations - which the GPU eats for breakfast, but again: high orders -> still an unsolved area of simulation mathematics; a lot of things happen which we don't have the answer for and they frequently disrupt the method from being applicable. As someone who uses spectral methods every day I would love to see this optical device work and therefore hopefully really push research hard on resolving some of its problems. I suspect its initial use will be limited to specialized problems, however.