Ann. Phys. Fr., Vol. 24, N°3 1999, pp. 197-215
DOI: 10.1051/anphys:199903011

Optical switchcubes for communications in parallel processors

P. Chavel¹, N. de Beaucoudrey¹, A. Bellemain¹, L. Rudolph², I. Exman², Y. Houzelle³ and J.M. Vanzo<sup>3

1</sup>  Institut d'Optique, CNRS, B.P. 147, 91403 Orsay Cedex, France.
²  Institute of Computer Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
³  Supelec, Technopole Metz 2000, 57058 Metz Cedex, France.

Abstract
We propose the concept of an "optical switchcube" to help handling the communication load in a parallel computer composed of tens or hundreds of processor clusters operating under the loosely synchronous model of parallel computing. A switchcube can establish a communication and send one packet of data from any node to any combination of the other nodes; several nodes can send data in parallel as long as some mechanism is used to avoid conflicts at the receiver end. A small scale experimental illustration has been implemented using commercially available acousto-optic technology; a bit error rate lower than 10^-12 was measured.

© EDP Sciences 1999

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