PhotoNoCs: Design Simulation Tool for Silicon Integrated Photonics Towards Exascale Systems

摘要

The need to greatly increase the number of compute nodes to design exascale systems raises numerous challenges that must be solved to obtain an efficient system in terms of cost, energy consumption and performance. Data movement is a critical barrier toward realizing exascale computing systems, and therefore the interconnection network is a key component of these systems. Among the different technologies that could contribute to an efficient interconnect, photonics is perhaps the most disruptive, due to its capabilities to generate, transmit, and receive high bandwidth signals with superior power efficiencies and inherent immunity to degradation. However, photonic interconnects lack from practical buffering, which make these networks circuit switched in its essence. Therefore, new network architectures are required, both to satisfy the requirements of data transfers between nodes and between the multiple computing resources of each multicore node. This paper presents PhotoNoCs as a tool which helps the computer architect to design and test new approaches of photonics interconnection systems at different levels: On-chip networks for multicore architectures and off-chip networks for the whole supercomputer.