High-performance parallel processors based on star-coupled WDM optical interconnects

As the performance of individual elements within parallel processing systems increases, increased communication capability between distributed processor and memory elements is required. There is great interest in using fiber optics to improve interconnect communication beyond that attainable using electronic technology. Several groups have considered WDM, star-coupled optical interconnects. In this paper, we propose a fiber optic transceiver to provide low latency, high bandwidth channels for such interconnects using a robust multimode fiber technology. We use instruction-level simulation to quantify the bandwidth, latency, and concurrency required for such interconnects to scale to 256 nodes, each operating at I GFLOPS performance. We show that performance scales to ≈100 GFLOPS for scientific application kernels using a small number of wavelengths (8 to 32), only one wavelength received per node, and achievable optoelectronic bandwidth and latency