A Photonic, Distributed, High-Performance Computer Interconnect.
Abstract
The advantages to optical transmission media and photonic switches over their electrical counterparts have been cited often. Optical waveguides such as glass fiber offer immunity from bandwidth-limiting electromagnetic effects and are capable of higher interconnection density, higher fanout, lower skew, and lower loss. The consensus is that for the foreseeable future, electronics will continue to have no rival for medium or high complexity information processing, while guided-wave optics will likely emerge as the choice for data communication at GHz rates between boards or even between chips. Consequently, efforts are being made to build networks using photonic switches to switch optical signals multiplexed in time or wavelength with switching controlled by electronic processors. Directional couplers are commonly used as switches because they are transparent to bit-rate and can switch a wide optical wavelength band, i.e. 25 nm or more. The authors believe the high network bandwidth realizable with optics is an important factor in reducing latency to remote memory locations in multiprocessors. High bandwidth translates into high levels of pipelining, making more effective such widely studied latency-hiding mechanisms as prefetching release consistency models and non-blocking writes, and multithreading. (KAR) P. 11
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1995
- Accession Number
- ADA302297
Entities
People
- Jon R. Sauer
Organizations
- University of Colorado Boulder