While transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks, their massive computational demands, especially during inference, pose a significant challenge. Photonic accelerators offer a promising solution, but existing designs struggle with the precision, dynamism, and storage requirements of modern LLMs. This paper introduces SCARLET, a hybrid photonic architecture that addresses these limitations through two key components. First, we design a high-density optical phase-change memory (OPCM) crossbar for static matrix multiplications, achieving 5.6× higher bit density and 86.43% lower energy compared to previous OPCM crossbar designs. Second, we introduce an approximate photonic floating-point multiplier to handle dynamic matrix multiplications and quantization steps by approximating floating-point computations with weighted integer sums, thus, eliminating the need for frequent memory reprogramming. Our evaluation on models with up to 13 billion parameters demonstrates significant performance improvements, including up to 17.15× and 8.45× lower latency during prefill and generation phases, respectively.

Ising problems are nondeterministic-polynomial-hard (NP-hard) problems prevalent in various domains, such as statistical physics, circuit design, and machine learning. They pose significant challenges for traditional algorithms and architectures. Researchers have recently developed nature-inspired Ising machines to tackle these optimization problems efficiently. Many optimization problems can be mapped to the Ising model, and physical laws will drive the Ising machine towards the solution. However, existing Ising machines suffer from scalability issues, i.e., performance drops when problem sizes exceed their physical capacity. In this paper, we propose SOPHIE, a Scalable Optical PHase-change memory (OPCM) based Ising Engine. SOPHIE integrates architectural, algorithmic, and device optimizations to address scalability challenges in Ising machines. We architect SOPHIE using 2.5D integration, where we integrate a controller chiplet, a DRAM chiplet, laser sources, and multiple OPCM chiplets. SOPHIE utilizes OPCMs to perform matrix-vector multiplications efficiently. Our symmetric tile mapping at the architecture level reduces approximately half of the OPCM array area, enhancing the scalability of SOPHIE. We use algorithmic optimizations to efficiently handle large problems that cannot fit within hardware constraints. Specifically, we adopt a symmetric local update technique and a stochastic global synchronization strategy. These two algorithmic approaches decompose large problems into isolated tiles, reduce computation requirements, and minimize communication in SOPHIE. We apply device-level optimizations to adopt the modified algorithm. These device-level optimizations include employing bi-directional OPCM arrays and dual-precision analog-to-digital converters. SOPHIE is 3 x faster than the state-of-the-art photonic Ising machines on small graphs and 125x faster than the FPGA-based designs on large problems. SOPHIE alleviates the hardware capacity constraints, offering a scalable and efficient alternative for solving Ising problems.