RSON: an Inter/Intra-Chip Silicon Photonic Network for Rack-Scale Computing Systems
Peng Yang1, Zhengbin Pang2, Zhifei Wang1, Zhehui Wang1, Min Xie2, Xuanqi Chen1, Luan H. K. Duong1 and Jiang Xu1
1The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
2National University of Defense Technology, China
ABSTRACT
The increasing demand for more computational power from scientific computing, big data processing, and machine learning is pushing the development of HPC (highperformance computing) systems. As the basic HPC building blocks, modularized server racks with a large number of multicore nodes are facing performance and energy efficiency challenges. This paper proposes RSON, an optical network for rack-scale computing systems. RSON connects processor cores, caches, local memories, and remote memories through a novel inter/intra-chip silicon photonic network architecture. We develop a low-latency scalable channel partition and low-power dynamic path priority control scheme for RSON. Experimental results show that RSON can help rack-scale computing systems achieve up to 6.8X higher performance under the same energy consumption than state-of-the-art systems under the latest APEX (application performance at extreme scale) benchmarks.
