Selective optical broadcasting in reconfigurable multiprocessor interconnects

Nowadays, multiprocessor systems are reaching their limits due to the large interconnection bottleneck between chips, but recent advances in the development of optical interconnect technologies can allow the use of low cost, scalable and reconfigurable networks to resolve the problem. In this paper, we make an initial evaluation of the performance gain on general network reconfigurability. In a next stage, we propose an optical system concept and describe a passive optical broadcasting component to be used as the key element in a broadcast-and-select reconfigurable network. We also discuss the available opto-electronic components and the restrictions they impose on network performance. Through detailed simulations of benchmark executions, we show that the proposed system architecture can provide a significant speedup for shared-memory machines, even when taking into account the limitations imposed by the opto-electronics and the presented optical broadcast component.