Design and Analysis of a Scalable 3-Dimensional Multicomputer Architecture Using Optical Interconnection for PetaFLOP Computing

摘要

In this paper, we present an initial design and analyses of an extremely scalable multicomputer architecture that has the potential to deliver in the order of petaFLOP performance. Our design takes advantage of free-space optical technologies, harnessing the features inherent in optics, to produce a 3D stack that implements efficiently a large, fully connected system of nodes forming a true 3D mesh. Each node is a complete computer system with both compute and storage units, and six communication interfaces to the optical medium. This packaging greatly improves density and communication performance. In future work, the system will be built to allow failed nodes stay in place without appreciable performance degradation. We investigate in detail the case study for 100 teraFLOP performance and describe the characteristics of the proposed hardware components in our case study.