Design of a high-speed optical interconnect for scalable shared memory multiprocessors

Abstract

The paper proposes a highly connected optical interconnect based architecture that maximizes the channel availability for future scalable parallel computers, such as distributed shared memory (DSM) multiprocessors and cluster networks. As the system size increases, various messages (requests, responses and acknowledgments) increase in the network resulting in contention. This results in increasing the remote memory access latency and significantly affects the performance of these parallel computers. As a solution, we propose an architecture called RAPID (reconfigurable and scalable all-photonic interconnect for distributed-shared memory), that provides low remote memory access latency by providing fast and efficient unicast, multicast and broadcast capabilities using a combination of aggressively designed WDM, TDM and SDM techniques. We evaluated RAPID based on network characteristics and by simulation using synthetic traffic workloads and compared it against other networks such as electrical ring, torus, mesh and hypercube networks. We found that RAPID outperforms all networks and satisfies most of the requirements of parallel computer design such as low latency, high bandwidth, high connectivity, and easy scalability.