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Fiber
Optic Backplane Interconnect for Supercomputers--Physical
Optics Corporation, Electro-Optics & Holog. Div.,
Dr.
Alexander Parfenov, Principal Investigator, sutama@poc.com
Mr.
Gordon Drew, Business Official, gdrew@poc.com
DOE
Grant No. DE-FG02-03ER83837
Amount:
$750,000
While
the computational power of scalable parallel computing systems has reached
trillions of operations per second, the bandwidth and latency of interconnection
system presents a bottleneck to further advances in computing performance.
Optical interconnects offer many advantages over electrical ones,
including higher spatial and temporal bandwidth, higher data rates, lower
crosstalk, lower power requirements, higher interconnect densities, lower clock
skews, reduced transmission-line-related effects, and thus increased signal
integrity at high frequencies. This
project will develop a fiber optic backplane interconnect for high-productivity
supercomputing that will make possible a scalable terabit all-optical ring
computer network. Phase I developed
optical hardware (multifiber optical connector, optical coupler, and wavelength
division multiplexing transceiver) that was used to prove the feasibility of the
interconnect. A working model
multi-wavelength interconnect exhibited a high data transfer rate with a low bit
error rate. In Phase II, an
efficient optical interconnection topology and architecture will be developed,
along with the optical and electro-optical devices required to implement the
optical interconnection architecture. Routing
algorithms and media access protocols also will be developed.
The performance and scalability of the optical architecture and its
applicability to high-speed supercomputing applications will be assessed.
Commercial Applications and Other
Benefits
as described by awardee: The
proposed interconnect in an all-optical network should have application to such
demanding tasks as weather forecasting, munition assessment and simulation, and
materials research. Government labs,
universities, and supercomputer developers represent potential customers for the
technology.