The ever-increasing demand for computational power and capacity has driven the growth of cluster computers to unprecedented scales. As modern high-performance computing (HPC) systems and data centers approach hundreds of thousands of processing and memory nodes, the electronic networks interconnecting these massive parallel environments have not only become a critical bottleneck constraining system performance, but are reaching unsustainable levels of power consumption as their capacities scale to meet burgeoning performance requirements.
This technology describes an integrated photonic network which can provide time-of-flight latencies and deliver bandwidths orders of magnitude higher than state-of-the-art electronic alternatives. Furthermore, all-optical switching can decouple the power consumption of the network from the bit-rate, decreasing power usage while increasing transmission of data.
This technology leverages the inherent capacity advantage of optics (via wavelength division multiplexing) to not only reach high bandwidths, but to simplify network design. Messages are kept in the optical domain with processing performed in a distributed fashion without the use of photonic buffers, allowing for ultra-low latencies and implementation via photonic integration, thus reducing costs and power consumption.
*High-performance computing (HPC) systems – hundreds of thousands of high-performance microprocessors require immediate, low latency access to distributed memories *Core routers – growing traffic at the network core demands high-capacity switching *Large-scale data center deployments and storage area networks – low power, high capacity switching can enable further scalability by reducing costs and increasing system efficiencies
Tech Ventures Reference: IR M05-086
