Optical Interconnects for High-Performance Computing Systems

A first step toward advanced optical interconnect technologies is a data-center switch using a multibus optical backplane. This network switch replaces the electronic backplane and communications fabric application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) with an optical fabric based on multiple optical broadcast buses. The prototype demonstrated reliable performance, and the optical bus can scale to much higher bandwidths. Thus, network switches using optical backplanes have significant advantages for future systems.