Benchmark Simulation and Experimental Testbed Studies of AWGR-based, Multi-Layer Photonic Interconnects for Low-Latency, Energy-Efficient Computing Architectures

In this work, we show future research directions about optical computing systems based on Arrayed Waveguide Grating Routers. We analyze the optical integration at different layers of large-scale architectures. At board-level, we aim to demonstrate significant execution time improvements and energy efficiency of optically interconnected systems running real benchmark applications on a cycle-accurate simulator. We simulate tiled optical Multi-Socket Blades (MSBs), and we implement multiple optimization techniques to achieve different tradeoffs between performance and energy consumption and to prove the importance of chip-level optical integration. In the large-scale we show, through a network simulator, significant latency and throughput improvement running uniform distributed traffic for both intraand inter-cluster optical-based architecture. A software framework, based on trace-driven approach, will be developed for benchmarking large-scale solutions. We show an experimental hardware setup for next future testbeds to demonstrate the efficiency, in terms of throughput and energy consumption, of the proposed optical architectures.