PDS: A Scalable-Feasible Parallel Computer Implementing Electronic and Optical Interconnections for 156 TeraOPS Minimum Performance

该项目的主要目标是为先进的MIMD计算机系统开发一种“点设计”，该系统能够实现至少100 TeraOPS的性能，其技术在不到十年的时间内肯定会变得可行。 该设计将利用自由空间光学技术来产生一维构建块（BB），该构建块有效地实现了大型的、几乎完全连接的处理器系统。 除了具有可扩展的架构之外，我们的BB还具有技术可扩展性，因此，随着光学技术的预期改进，BB中包含的处理器数量可能会大幅增加。 一个简单的二维结构，提出了完整的系统，其中上述一维BB扩展到二维。 利用现有技术，全球范围的光互连网络可以被看作是一个由相对较短的塑料条组成的网格，处理器卡的接口连接到该网格上。 每个处理器卡包含八个处理器，它们通过电子纵横在本地互连。 利用更高速的光学技术，所有八个处理器共享二维系统的相同光学接口。 它的高级架构也是可伸缩的，因为它可以直接向前扩展到大于2的任何数量的维度。

The main objective of this project is to develop a "point design" for an advanced MIMD computer system capable of achieving at least 100 TeraOPS performance with technology that will definitely become feasible in less than a decade. This design will take advantage of free-space optical technologies to produce a one-dimensional building block (BB) that implements efficiently a large, almost fully-connected system of processors. In addition to having a scaleable architecture, our BB is also technology scaleable, and therefore the number of contained processors in the BB could increase dramatically with expected improvements in optical technologies. A simple two-dimensional structure is proposed for the complete system, where the aforementioned one-dimensional BB is extended into two dimensions. With readily available technology, the word-wide optical interconnection network can be viewed as a mesh of relatively short plastic bars to which interfaces to processor cards are attached. Each processor card contains eight processors interconnected locally with an electronic crossbar. Taking advantage of higher-speed optical technologies, all eight processors share the same optical interface to the two-dimensional system. Its high-level architecture is also scaleable, because it can be extended straight forwardly for any number of dimensions larger than two.