Empowering Flexible and Scalable High Performance Architectures with Embedded Photonics

The recent explosive growth in data analytics applications that rely on machine and deep learning techniques are seismically changing the landscape of high performance architectures. These techniques rely on graphics processing units (GPU) and manycore (CPU) technologies whose need for intense performance is pushing current interconnect networks to their limits. Driven by these applications, the execution performance along with the energy consumption of massive parallel systems is increasingly determined by how data is moved among the numerous compute and memory resources. Embedded photonic interconnect technologies can address critical data-movement challenges by delivering higher communication bandwidth densities at significantly improved energy efficiencies. New disaggregated architectures enabled by embedded photonics and optical bandwidth steering can reduce the system-wide energy consumption.