BOIN: A novel Bufferless Optical Interconnection Network for high performance computer

Most of the present optical interconnect networks within the high performance computers require either the buffering and opto-electonic conversion of the data packets or the pre-assigning of the optical path from the source to destination, which to a certain extent influence the performance metrics such as latency and throughput. Aiming at the limitation mentioned above, a hybrid optical-electrical interconnection for high performance computer system named bufferless optical interconnection network (BOIN) is brought forward together with the link control protocol and deadlock/livelock free routing algorithms. The upper bound of the data transmission latency within BOIN is also given. Experimental simulation is based on the comparison of BOIN and the other two similar networks. The results show that BOIN has advantages over the other two that it can deliver high throughput at low latency, which can well satisfy the need for high performance computing systems.