Architecture of a specialized back-end high performance computing-based PCE for flexgrid networks

The requirement of executing network re-optimization operations to efficiently manage and deploy new generation flexgrid-based optical networks has brought to light the need of some specialized PCEs capable of performing such high time-consuming computations. The objective of such re-optimizations is to compute network reconfigurations to be done based on the current state of network resources to achieve near-optimal resources utilization. Such PCEs require high performance computing equipment to process the huge amount of data in both the Traffic Engineering (TED) and the Label Switched Path (LSP-DB) databases in a unified computation step. To deal with this problem, a High Performance Computing (HPC) Graphics Process Unit (GPU)-based cluster architecture is proposed in this paper. This architecture is capable of attending to Path Computation Element (PCE) requests demanding execution of network re-optimization tasks, perform such computations and report a near-optimal solution in practical times.