ATAC: Improving performance and programmability with on-chip optical networks

James Psota, Jason Miller, George Kurian, Henry Hoffman, Nathan Beckmann, Jonathan Eastep, Anant Agarwal
2010 Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems  
Given the current trends in multicore scaling, chips with 1000 cores may exist within the next 5 to 10 years. However, their promise of increased performance will only be reached if their inherent scaling and programming challenges are overcome. Meanwhile, recent advances in nanophotonic device manufacturing are making CMOSintegrated optics a reality-interconnect technology which can provide more bandwidth at lower power than conventional electronics. Perhaps more importantly, optical
more » ... ct also has the potential to enable new, easy-to-use programming models enabled by its inexpensive broadcast mechanism. This paper introduces ATAC, a new manycore architecture that capitalizes on the recent advances in optics to address a number of challenges that future manycore designs will face. The new constraints and opportunities of on-chip optical interconnect are presented and explored in the design of ATAC. Furthermore, this paper discusses ATAC's programming models, and introduces Consumer Tagging, a novel programming model that leverages ATAC's strengths to provide high performance and scalability.
doi:10.1109/iscas.2010.5537892 dblp:conf/iscas/PsotaMKHBEA10 fatcat:3buhnrvzivfvtli5643b5ncnhm