Selective optical broadcasting in reconfigurable multiprocessor interconnects

Iñigo Artundo, Lieven Desmet, Wim Heirman, Christof Debaes, Joni Dambre, Jan Van Campenhout, Hugo Thienpont, Hugo Thienpont, Mohammad R. Taghizadeh, Peter Van Daele, Jürgen Mohr
2006 Micro-Optics, VCSELs, and Photonic Interconnects II: Fabrication, Packaging, and Integration  
Nowadays, multiprocessor systems are reaching their limits due to the large interconnection bottleneck between chips, but recent advances in the development of optical interconnect technologies can allow the use of low cost, scalable and reconfigurable networks to resolve the problem. In this paper, we make an initial evaluation of the performance gain on general network reconfigurability. In a next stage, we propose an optical system concept and describe a passive optical broadcasting
more » ... to be used as the key element in a broadcast-and-select reconfigurable network. We also discuss the available opto-electronic components and the restrictions they impose on network performance. Through detailed simulations of benchmark executions, we show that the proposed system architecture can provide a significant speedup for shared-memory machines, even when taking into account the limitations imposed by the opto-electronics and the presented optical broadcast component. Sun Fire Link Sun 3-5 µsec 792 MB/s Myrinet XP2 Myricom 5.5 µsec 495 MB/s Requirements for the different levels of communication in a multiprocessor system are different depending on the nodes being connected. The links between processors and local memories require the lowest latency and highest performance, while board-to-board links allow for higher latencies but require higher power and bandwidth transmitted, along with card and connector specifications. This way, current point-to-point interconnection technologies include HyperTransport [3], Sun Fireplane [4] and parallel RapidIO [5] for chip-to-chip links, and serial RapidIO and PCI Express [6] for boardto-board links (see table 1).
doi:10.1117/12.662882 fatcat:cvtw6b7ufvbsveluqehnt7u7je