학술논문

Wavelength stealing: An opportunistic approach to channel sharing in multi-chip photonic interconnects
Document Type
Conference
Source
2013 46th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO) Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2013 46th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on. :222-233 Dec, 2013
Subject
Computing and Processing
Power lasers
Bandwidth
Topology
Optical losses
Optical waveguides
Photonics
Power demand
Interconnection Networks
Nanophotonics
Language
Abstract
Silicon photonic technology offers seamless integration of multiple chips with high bandwidth density and lower energy-per-bit consumption compared to electrical interconnects. The topology of a photonic interconnect impacts both its performance and laser power requirements. The point-to-point (P2P) topology offers arbitration-free connectivity with low energy-per-bit consumption, but suffers from low node-to-node bandwidth. Topologies with channel-sharing improve inter-node bandwidth but incur higher laser power consumption in addition to the performance costs associated with arbitration and contention. In this paper, we analytically demonstrate the limits of channel-sharing under a fixed laser power budget and quantify its maximum benefits with realistic device loss characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel photonic interconnect architecture that uses opportunistic channel-sharing. The network does not incur any arbitration overheads and guarantees fairness. We evaluate this interconnect architecture using detailed simulation in the context of a 64-node photonically interconnected message passing multichip system. We show that this new approach achieves up to 28% better energy-delay-product (EDP) compared to the P2P network for HPC applications. Furthermore, we show that when applied to a cluster partitioned into multiple virtual machines (VM), this interconnect provides a guaranteed 1.27× higher node-to-node bandwidth regardless of the traffic patterns within each VM.