Communication technologies for exascale systems

Scaling computing systems to Exaflops (1018 floating point operations per second) will require tremendous increases in communications bandwidth but with greatly reduced power consumption per communicated bit as compared to today's petaflop machines. Reaching the required performance in both density and power consumption will be extremely challenging. Electrical and optical interconnect technologies that may be part of the solution are summarized, including advanced electrical printed circuit boards, VCSEL-array based optical interconnects over multimode fibers or waveguides, and singlemode silicon photonics. The use of optical interconnects will play an ever-larger role in intrasystem communications. Although optics is used today primarily between racks, it will gradually migrate into backplanes, circuit cards, and eventually even on-chip. Keywords: optical interconnects, supercomputers, exascale,

[1]  Hyundai Park,et al.  A Hybrid AlGaInAs–Silicon Evanescent Amplifier , 2007, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[2]  Dean M. Tullsen,et al.  Interconnections in Multi-Core Architectures: Understanding Mechanisms, Overheads and Scaling , 2005, ISCA 2005.

[3]  D.A.B. Miller.  Joining optics and electronics for information processing and communication , 2007, LEOS 2007 - IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings.

[4]  C.L. Schow,et al.  A Single-Chip CMOS-Based Parallel Optical Transceiver Capable of 240-Gb/s Bidirectional Data Rates , 2009, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[5]  Ray T. Chen,et al.  45° polymer-based total internal reflection coupling mirrors for fully embedded intraboard guided wave optical interconnects , 2005 .

[6]  M.E. Ali,et al.  Direct integration of dense parallel optical interconnects on a first level package for high-end servers , 2005, Proceedings Electronic Components and Technology, 2005. ECTC '05..

[7]  F. Horst,et al.  Development of a low-cost low-loss polymer waveguide technology for parallel optical interconnect applications , 2004, Digest of the LEOS Summer Topical Meetings Biophotonics/Optical Interconnects and VLSI Photonics/WBM Microcavities, 2004..

[8]  Xiaoxiong Gu,et al.  Is 25 Gb/s On-Board Signaling Viable? , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging.

[9]  John Bowers,et al.  Hybrid silicon evanescent laser fabricated with a silicon waveguide and III-V offset quantum wells. , 2005, Optics express.

[10]  J.A. Tierno,et al.  Performance of Simulated Annealing Algorithm in Equalized Multimode Fiber Links With Linear Equalizers , 2006, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[11]  Qianfan Xu,et al.  12.5 Gbit/s carrier-injection-based silicon micro-ring silicon modulators. , 2007, Optics express.

[12]  E. Cohen,et al.  Hotspot-Limited Microprocessors: Direct Temperature and Power Distribution Measurements , 2007, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[13]  Rami G. Melhem,et al.  On the Feasibility of Optical Circuit Switching for High Performance Computing Systems , 2005, ACM/IEEE SC 2005 Conference (SC'05).

[14]  Moray McLaren,et al.  A high-speed optical multi-drop bus for computer interconnections , 2009 .

[15]  E. Schenfeld,et al.  A reconfigurable interconnect fabric with optical circuit switch and software optimizer for stream computing systems , 2009, 2009 Conference on Optical Fiber Communication - incudes post deadline papers.

[16]  D. Kucharski,et al.  A Fully Integrated 20-Gb/s Optoelectronic Transceiver Implemented in a Standard 0.13- $\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS SOI Technology , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[17]  Jung Ho Ahn,et al.  A nanophotonic interconnect for high-performance many-core computation , 2008 .

[18]  F. Xia,et al.  High-throughput silicon nanophotonic wavelength-insensitive switch for on-chip optical networks , 2008 .

[19]  Boris Murmann,et al.  A/D converter trends: Power dissipation, scaling and digitally assisted architectures , 2008, 2008 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference.

[20]  M. Karppinen,et al.  Fabrication and characterization of polymer optical waveguides with integrated micromirrors for three-dimensional board-level optical interconnects , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Electronics Packaging Manufacturing.

[21]  Cary Gunn,et al.  CMOS Photonics for High-Speed Interconnects , 2006, IEEE Micro.

[22]  Luca P. Carloni,et al.  The Case for Low-Power Photonic Networks on Chip , 2007, 2007 44th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference.

[23]  K. Bergman,et al.  On-Chip Photonic Communication for High-Performance Multi-Core Processors [ Extended , 2007 .

[24]  L. Sekaric,et al.  Ultra-compact, low RF power, 10 Gb/s silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator. , 2007, Optics express.

[25]  Henry Samueli.  The Broadband Revolution , 2000, IEEE Micro.

[26]  Dean M. Tullsen,et al.  Interconnections in multi-core architectures: understanding mechanisms, overheads and scaling , 2005, 32nd International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA'05).

[27]  R.R. Tummala,et al.  Chip-to-chip optoelectronics SOP on organic boards or packages , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging.

[28]  Dan Song,et al.  A Fully Integrated 4 $\times$ 10-Gb/s DWDM Optoelectronic Transceiver Implemented in a Standard 0.13 $\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS SOI Technology , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[29]  J.A. Kash.  IntraChip Optical Networks for a Future Supercomputer-on-a-Chip , 2007, 2007 Photonics in Switching.

[30]  Saurabh Dighe,et al.  An 80-Tile 1.28TFLOPS Network-on-Chip in 65nm CMOS , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers.

[31]  C. Schow,et al.  300-Gb/s 24-channel bidirectional Si carrier transceiver Optochip for board-level interconnects , 2008, 2008 58th Electronic Components and Technology Conference.

[32]  Vikas Agarwal,et al.  Clock rate versus IPC: the end of the road for conventional microarchitectures , 2000, Proceedings of 27th International Symposium on Computer Architecture (IEEE Cat. No.RS00201).

[33]  R. Dangel,et al.  Measurement of optical dispersion in multimode polymer waveguides , 2004, Digest of the LEOS Summer Topical Meetings Biophotonics/Optical Interconnects and VLSI Photonics/WBM Microcavities, 2004..

[34]  Alexander Fang,et al.  An all-silicon Raman laser , 2005, Nature.

[35]  R. Beyeler,et al.  Polymer-Waveguide-Based Board-Level Optical Interconnect Technology for Datacom Applications , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging.

[36]  Bo Lu,et al.  Monolithically integrated high speed DFB BH laser arrays for 10 Gbased LX4 application , 2006, 2006 Optical Fiber Communication Conference and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference.

[37]  H. Thienpont,et al.  Laser ablation of parallel optical interconnect waveguides , 2006, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[38]  L. Schares,et al.  160 Gb/s Bidirectional Polymer-Waveguide Board-Level Optical Interconnects Using CMOS-Based Transceivers , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging.

[39]  Richard Corkish,et al.  Very efficient light emission from bulk crystalline silicon , 2003 .

[40]  S. Corzine,et al.  High-Speed 985 nm Bottom-Emitting VCSEL Arrays for Chip-to-Chip Parallel Optical Interconnects , 2007, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

[41]  William J. Dally,et al.  Route packets, not wires: on-chip inteconnection networks , 2001, DAC '01.

[42]  Mike Ignatowski,et al.  Exploitation of optical interconnects in future server architectures , 2005, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[43]  A. Glebov,et al.  Optical interconnect modules with fully integrated reflector mirrors , 2005, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[44]  Christopher Batten,et al.  Building Manycore Processor-to-DRAM Networks with Monolithic Silicon Photonics , 2008, 2008 16th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects.

[45]  F. Xia,et al.  Ultra-compact high order ring resonator filters using submicron silicon photonic wires for on-chip optical interconnects. , 2007, Optics express.

[46]  Luca P. Carloni,et al.  On the Design of a Photonic Network-on-Chip , 2007, First International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NOCS'07).

[47]  C.L. Schow,et al.  Low-Power 16 x 10 Gb/s Bi-Directional Single Chip CMOS Optical Transceivers Operating at ≪ 5 mW/Gb/s/link , 2009, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[48]  Arvind Kumar,et al.  Three-dimensional integrated circuits , 2006, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[49]  Roger Dangel,et al.  Waveguide-coupled parallel optical transceiver technology for Tb/s-class chip-to-chip data transmission , 2008, SPIE OPTO.

[50]  Vladimir Stojanovic,et al.  Silicon photonics for compact, energy-efficient interconnects [Invited] , 2007, Journal of Optical Networking.

[51]  F. Xia,et al.  Ultracompact optical buffers on a silicon chip , 2007 .

[52]  S. Gowda,et al.  A 10-Gb/s 5-Tap DFE/4-Tap FFE Transceiver in 90-nm CMOS Technology , 2006, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[53]  J. Witzens,et al.  High-speed, monolithic CMOS receivers at 1550nm with Ge on Si waveguide photodetectors , 2007, LEOS 2007 - IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings.

[54]  Ken Mai,et al.  The future of wires , 2001, Proc. IEEE.