Optical packet-switched interconnect based on wavelength-division- multiplexed clockwork routing

A crucial part of large-scale high-performance computing systems is the interconnection network. We describe an optical self-routing network based on a combination of 'clockwork' routing and wavelength division multiplexing to provide low latency and high bandwidth, with large scalability. The optical-layer architecture is described in detail, and results obtained from full numerical simulations of traffic performance demonstrate scalability to networks as large as 2048 nodes in a flat single-stage network architecture.