Abstract
The scalability trends of modern semiconductor technology lead to increasingly dense multicore chips. Unfortunately, physical limitations in area, power, off-chip bandwidth, and yield constrain single-chip designs to a relatively small number of cores, beyond which scaling becomes impractical. Multi-chip designs overcome these constraints, and can reach scales impossible to realize with conventional single-chip architectures. However, to deliver commensurate performance, multi-chip architectures require a cross-chip interconnect with bandwidth, latency, and energy consumption well beyond the reach of electrical signaling. We propose Galaxy, an architecture that enables the construction of a many-core "virtual chip" by connecting multiple smaller chiplets through optical fibers. The low optical loss of fibers allows the flexible placement of chiplets, and offers simpler packaging, power, and heat requirements. At the same time, the low latency and high bandwidth density of optical signaling maintain the tight coupling of cores, allowing the virtual chip to match the performance of a single chip that is not subject to area, power, and bandwidth limitations. Our results indicate that Galaxy attains speedup of 2.2x over the best single-chip alternatives with electrical or photonic interconnects (3.4x maximum), and 2.6x smaller energy-delay product (6.8x maximum). We show that Galaxy scales to 4K cores and attains 2.5x speedup at 6x lower laser power compared to a Macrochip with silicon waveguides.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | ICS 2014 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Pages | 303-312 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781450326421 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2014 |
| Event | 28th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, ICS 2014 - Munich, Germany Duration: Jun 10 2014 → Jun 13 2014 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing |
|---|
Other
| Other | 28th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing, ICS 2014 |
|---|---|
| Country | Germany |
| City | Munich |
| Period | 6/10/14 → 6/13/14 |
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Keywords
- energy efficiency
- interconnection networks
- nanophotonics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Computer Science(all)
Cite this
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Galaxy : A high-performance energy-efficient multi-chip architecture using photonic interconnects. / Demir, Yigit; Pan, Yan; Song, Seukwoo; Hardavellas, Nikos; Kim, John; Memik, Gokhan.
ICS 2014 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. p. 303-312 (Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing).Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
TY - GEN
T1 - Galaxy
T2 - A high-performance energy-efficient multi-chip architecture using photonic interconnects
AU - Demir, Yigit
AU - Pan, Yan
AU - Song, Seukwoo
AU - Hardavellas, Nikos
AU - Kim, John
AU - Memik, Gokhan
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - The scalability trends of modern semiconductor technology lead to increasingly dense multicore chips. Unfortunately, physical limitations in area, power, off-chip bandwidth, and yield constrain single-chip designs to a relatively small number of cores, beyond which scaling becomes impractical. Multi-chip designs overcome these constraints, and can reach scales impossible to realize with conventional single-chip architectures. However, to deliver commensurate performance, multi-chip architectures require a cross-chip interconnect with bandwidth, latency, and energy consumption well beyond the reach of electrical signaling. We propose Galaxy, an architecture that enables the construction of a many-core "virtual chip" by connecting multiple smaller chiplets through optical fibers. The low optical loss of fibers allows the flexible placement of chiplets, and offers simpler packaging, power, and heat requirements. At the same time, the low latency and high bandwidth density of optical signaling maintain the tight coupling of cores, allowing the virtual chip to match the performance of a single chip that is not subject to area, power, and bandwidth limitations. Our results indicate that Galaxy attains speedup of 2.2x over the best single-chip alternatives with electrical or photonic interconnects (3.4x maximum), and 2.6x smaller energy-delay product (6.8x maximum). We show that Galaxy scales to 4K cores and attains 2.5x speedup at 6x lower laser power compared to a Macrochip with silicon waveguides.
AB - The scalability trends of modern semiconductor technology lead to increasingly dense multicore chips. Unfortunately, physical limitations in area, power, off-chip bandwidth, and yield constrain single-chip designs to a relatively small number of cores, beyond which scaling becomes impractical. Multi-chip designs overcome these constraints, and can reach scales impossible to realize with conventional single-chip architectures. However, to deliver commensurate performance, multi-chip architectures require a cross-chip interconnect with bandwidth, latency, and energy consumption well beyond the reach of electrical signaling. We propose Galaxy, an architecture that enables the construction of a many-core "virtual chip" by connecting multiple smaller chiplets through optical fibers. The low optical loss of fibers allows the flexible placement of chiplets, and offers simpler packaging, power, and heat requirements. At the same time, the low latency and high bandwidth density of optical signaling maintain the tight coupling of cores, allowing the virtual chip to match the performance of a single chip that is not subject to area, power, and bandwidth limitations. Our results indicate that Galaxy attains speedup of 2.2x over the best single-chip alternatives with electrical or photonic interconnects (3.4x maximum), and 2.6x smaller energy-delay product (6.8x maximum). We show that Galaxy scales to 4K cores and attains 2.5x speedup at 6x lower laser power compared to a Macrochip with silicon waveguides.
KW - energy efficiency
KW - interconnection networks
KW - nanophotonics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84903788778&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84903788778&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2597652.2597664
DO - 10.1145/2597652.2597664
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84903788778
SN - 9781450326421
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing
SP - 303
EP - 312
BT - ICS 2014 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
ER -