Virtualization of a Photonic Reservoir Computer

Reservoir computer is an efficient dynamical computing concept that was introduced at the onset of this century for processing time-dependent signals. Several photonic implementations have demonstrated good performances, taking advantage of the components developed for optical telecommunications. However, in implementations based on a delay line that use an input desynchronized with respect to the period of the delay line, the effective used bandwidth is generally far from the one allowed by the physical setups. To use more of the available bandwidth, we propose an original solution that consists on time interleaving several reservoirs on the same physical setup. These are then used to process several tasks independently, but simultaneously on the same physical setup. We call them virtual reservoir computers. We report a proof-of-concept demonstration with three virtual reservoirs. The present results further demonstrate the versatility of photonic reservoir computing.