A Study of High-Speed Link Switching Technologies in High Performance Computing

With the development of optical interconnection and RF interconnection, the bandwidth of links will increase to 10Tbps order of magnitude or more in five to seven years. The increase of bandwidth will visibly affect the choice of switching method. Based on the high-speed links in high performance computer (HPC), this paper studies circuit switching, store-and-forward switching and wormhole switching technologies, theoretically analyzes their time delay, link utilization etc. and also uses simulation tool OMNeT++ to validate the results. We get a conclusion that the circuit switching technology together with link multiplexing has a better real-time performance and it is more suitable for high-speed links in HPC.