Latency-avoiding Dynamic Optical Circuit Prefetching Using Application-specific Predictors

Optical circuits are capable of providing large bandwidth improvements relative to electrical-switched networks in high-performance computing (HPC) systems. However, due to the circuit switching nature of optical systems, setup delays may prevent HPC systems from fully utilizing the available bandwidth. This paper proposes an applicationguided circuit management technique that can achieve latency-avoiding dynamic reconfiguration, better leveraging the high-bandwidth photonics and accelerating system performance. By learning the temporal locality and communication patterns from upper-layer applications, the technique not only caches a set of circuits to maximize reuse, but also prefetches predicted circuits to actively hide the setup latency. We apply the technique to communication patterns from a spectrum of science and engineering applications. The results show that setup delays via circuit misses are significantly reduced, showing how the proposed technique can improve circuit switching in HPC optical interconnects.