Optical interconnects for multiprocessors cost performance trade-offs

The authors demonstrate the performance advantages of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based optical interconnects in the face of partial structures dictated by the hardware restrictions of the currently available technology. Because the cost of optical communication hardware for WDM-star-based interconnects may be high, reduced cost structures have been introduced. The performance of the optical implementations of the reduced cost structures is compared to that of the electronic implementations for the hypercube topology. The performance is compared in terms of the communication overhead in implementing two commonly used algorithms on these structures. Results indicate that, in most situations, the optically implemented reduced cost variations perform better than the electronic implementations. Moreover, the hardware cost-performance tradeoffs show that among the optically implemented schemes, the performance degradation of the reduced cost variations is not significant in view of the hardware savings involved