Development and Design of Reconfigurable and Scalable Optical Interconnection Architectures for Next Generation High-Performance Computing Systems

本研究探讨光技术在未来高性能计算(HPC)系统通信问题中的应用。我们的目标是开发灵活且可动态重新配置的光互连体系结构，该体系结构将扩展到大量处理器，同时提供可扩展的带宽、低通信延迟、低功耗和低成本。所提出的方法是将体系结构、技术、模拟和物理演示相结合的有组织的努力。提出的研究包括三个相互关联的任务：(1)开发和设计用于高性能计算机的可重构和可扩展的光互连结构，(2)识别和表征实现所建议的结构所需的可能的光学元件，以及(3)开发用于光学实现技术的精确物理建模的分析建模和仿真工具，以及所建议的体系结构的端到端系统建模。随着芯片的特征尺寸减小到亚微米级，时钟频率增加到多GHz范围，电互连预计将达到其基本极限，并成为性能的最终瓶颈。这一限制将导致未来高性能计算机的带宽严重失衡，并严重影响其性能和可扩展性。已被公认为具有解决HPC系统通信问题的潜力的技术之一是光学互连。

This research explores the application of optical technology to the communication problems of future high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The goal is to develop flexible and dynamically reconfigurable optical interconnection architectures that will scale to a large number of processors while delivering scalable bandwidth, low communication latency, low power consumption, and low cost. The proposed approach is an organized effort combining architecture, technology, simulation and physical demonstration. The proposed research consists of three inter-related tasks: (1) Development and design of reconfigurable and scalable optical interconnection architectures for HPCs, (2) Identification and characterization of possible optical components necessary for the implementation of the proposed architectures, and (3) Development of analytic modeling and simulation tools for the precise physical modeling of the optical implementation techniques, as well as end-to-end system modeling of the proposed architectures. As feature sizes in CMOS chips decrease to the sub-micron regime, and clock rates increase to the multi-GHz range, electrical interconnects are predicted to reach their fundamental limits and become the ultimate bottleneck for performance. This limitation will result in major bandwidth imbalances in future high-performance computers, and significantly affect their performance and scalability. One of the technologies that has been recognized to have the potential to solve communication problems of HPC systems is optical interconnects.