Communication technologies for exascale systems

Abstract

Scaling computing systems to Exaflops (1018 floating point operations per second) will require tremendous increases in communications bandwidth but with greatly reduced power consumption per communicated bit as compared to today's petaflop machines. Reaching the required performance in both density and power consumption will be extremely challenging. Electrical and optical interconnect technologies that may be part of the solution are summarized, including advanced electrical printed circuit boards, VCSEL-array based optical interconnects over multimode fibers or waveguides, and singlemode silicon photonics. The use of optical interconnects will play an ever-larger role in intrasystem communications. Although optics is used today primarily between racks, it will gradually migrate into backplanes, circuit cards, and eventually even on-chip. © 2009 SPIE.