Partitioned optical passive star (POPS) multiprocessor interconnection networks with distributed control

Abstract

This paper presents a partitioned optical passive star (POPS) interconnection topology and a control methodology that, together, provide the high throughput and low latency required for tightly coupled multiprocessor interconnection applications. The POPS topology has constant and symmetric optical coupler fanout and only one coupler between any two nodes of the network. Distributed control is based on the state sequence routing paradigm which multiplexes the network between a small set of control states and defines control operations to be transformations of those states. These networks have highly scalable characteristics for optical power budget, resource count, and message latency. Optical power is uniformly distributed and the size of the system is not directly limited by the power budget. Resource complexity grows as O(n) for the couplers, O(n/spl radic/n) for transceivers, and O[/spl radic/nlog(n)] for control. We present analysis and simulation studies which demonstrate the ability of a POPS network to support large scale parallel processing (1024 nodes) using current device and coupler technology.