MASSIVELY PARALLEL COMPUTERS USING OPTICAL INTERCONNECTS THE SYNOPTIQUE PROJECT

The use of computers in industry, research centres, telecommunications and at home is growing very quickly. When the applications are time consuming, such as image or signal processing, embedded processing or CAD software, the use of powerful parallel computers becomes a necessity. For this reason, we began to design, in 1987, a parallel computer, named Sympati2, dedicated to low level image processing. Six years later, we designed another parallel computer, called Symphonie, which is well suited for iconic and symbolic data processing. We are now working on a new generation of parallel computers which will use fast electronic ASIC based on 0.25(m standard cell technology. However, although the clock frequency can be very high in those components, this is not the case for the speed of the inputs and outputs. In order to fully take advantage of powerful components within parallel architectures, we started two years ago a research project named Synoptique in which we are studying the advantages of optical interconnects in our domain. This project is carried out in collaboration with the Optical Department of ONERA CERT.

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