Performance adaptive power-aware reconfigurable optical interconnects for high-performance computing (HPC) systems

As communication distances and bit rates increase, optoelectronic interconnects are being deployed for designing high-bandwidth low-latency interconnection networks for high performance computing (HPC) systems. While bandwidth scaling with efficient multiplexing techniques (wavelengths, time and space) are available, static assignment of wavelengths can be detrimental to network performance for nonuniform (adversial) workloads. Dynamic bandwidth re-allocation based on actual traffic pattern can lead to improved network performance by utilizing idle resources. While dynamic bandwidth re-allocation (DBR) techniques can alleviate interconnection bottlenecks, power consumption also increases considerably. In this paper, we propose to improve the performance of optical interconnects using DBR techniques and simultaneously optimize the power consumption using Dynamic Power Management (DPM) techniques. DBR re-allocates idle channels to busy channels (wavelengths) for improving throughput and DPM regulates the bit rates and supply voltages for the individual channels. A reconfigurable opto-electronic architecture and a performance adaptive algorithm for implementing DBR and DPM are proposed in this paper. Our proposed reconfiguration algorithm achieves a significant reduction in power consumption and considerable improvement in throughput with a marginal increase in latency for various traffic patterns. (c) 2007 ACM.