Enhanced scaling and performance of an optical interconnect based on wavelength-division-multiplexed clockwork routing

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

An optical routing network for applications requiring large numbers of nodes and low latency, such as the interconnection network inside a future high-end supercomputer, is described. The network is a development of an existing architecture based on a combination of clockwork routing and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM-CR). Although using the same underlying photonic technologies as WDM-CR, the new architecture has several advantages, including the following: the network can be scaled to greater numbers of nodes; routing between closely located nodes is more direct, resulting in lower latency and higher overall throughput; arbitration and control mechanisms are simplified; and the need for optical amplification is removed. Results obtained from full discrete-event traffic simulations demonstrate scalability to interconnection networks as large as 4096 nodes in a flat architecture.