Let there be light!: the future of memory systems is photonics and 3D stacking

Abstract

Energy consumption is the fundamental barrier to exascale supercomputing and it is dominated by the cost of moving data from one point to another, not computation. Similarly, performance is dominated by data movement, not computation. The solution to this problem requires three critical technologies: 3D integration, optical chip-to-chip communication, and a new communication model. A memory system based on these technologies has the potential to lower the cost of local memory accesses by orders of magnitude and provide substantially more bandwidth. To reach the goals of exascale computing with a manageable power budget, the industry will have to adopt these technologies. Doing so will enable exascale computing, and will have a major worldwide economic impact.