ABSTRACT
Large-scale applications are demanding more processing cores and computation power, and rack-scale computing system becomes a promising choice for exascale systems as Moore’s Law is slowing down. To meet these requirements, communication becomes a challenge for rack-scale systems. Optical interconnects show their superiority in latency, bandwidth and power consumption, which makes them an alternative to address the performance and energy efficiency issues. In this chapter, we systematically analyze the rack-scale optical network (RSON) architecture with different path reservation schemes and optical inter-chip networks and the most commonly used architecture for high-performance computing systems. We explore the RSON architecture, floorplan optimized delta optical network (FODON) switch architecture and the preemptive chain feedback (PCF) scheme to optimize multi-domain path reservation. Experimental results show that the RSON with FODON switch and PCF scheme can improve system performance per energy consumption by up to five times, and around four times on average, while still maintaining better scalability than state-of-the-art systems.
