Applying Optical Interconnects to the 3-D Computer: A Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Application-specific WSI architectures such as the 3-D Computer are generally limited to high performance execution on a small class of computations. We propose various architectural and technological augmentations that may broaden the application domain of WSI-based architectures. Specifically, we compare the potential performance advantages of the 3-D Computer with low-diameter, high-bandwidth optical interprocessor and I/O networks against other electronic-based augmentations using sorting applications as benchmarks, With the proposed augmentations, speed-up factors of ≍ √P/10 (P is the number of processors) are theoretically possible for communication intensive permutation-oriented algorithms.