A POINT DESIGN TOWARDS PetaFLOPS COMPUTING
Sotirios G. Ziavras, Haim Grebel, and Anthony Chronopoulos
This is a ``point design'' for an MIMD distributed shared-memory parallel
computer capable of achieving gracious 100 TeraFLOPS performance with technology
that will definitely become feasible/viable in less than a decade. Its
scalability guarantees a lifetime extending well into the next century.
Our design takes advantage of free-space optical technologies, with simple
guided-wave concepts, to produce a 1-D building block (BB) that implements
efficiently a large, fully-connected system of processors. Designing fully-connected,
large systems of electronic processors could be an immediate impact of
optics on massively-parallel processing. A 2-D structure is proposed for
the complete system, where the aforementioned 1-D BB is extended into two
dimensions. This architecture behaves like a 2-D generalized hypercube,
which is characterized by outstanding performance and extremely high wiring
complexity that prohibits its electronic implementation. With readily available
technology, a mesh of clear plastic bars in our design facilitate bit-parallel
transmissions that utilize wavelength-division multiplexing and follow
dedicated optical paths. Each processor is mounted on a card. Each card
contains eight processors interconnected locally via an electronic crossbar.
Taking advantage of higher-speed optical technologies, all eight processors
share the same interface to the optical medium. Encouraging, preliminary
results prove that our conservative design could have a tremendous, positive
impact on massively-parallel computing in the near future. Another impressive
property of our system is that its bisection bandwidth matches, within
an order of magnitude, the performance of its computation engine. Our optical
interconnection scheme is superior to other optical schemes because it
is scalable, feasible, viable, fast, power efficient, point-to-point, and
does not have an adverse effect on the system's size. We expect 2-D and
3-D implementations of our design to achieve gracious PetaFLOPS performance
before the end of the next decade.
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Last updated 11/02/98, SGZ