Departmental Colloquium
PROPEL: Power and Area-Efficient Nanophotonic Interconnect for Future Multicores
Dr. Avinash Kodi
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University
Thursday November 5, 2009
12:00 pm - 5317 SENSQ
Hosted by Dr. Rami Melhem
Abstract
As communication-centric computing paradigm gathers momentum due to increased wire delays and excess power dissipation with technology scaling, researchers have focused their attention on developing alternate technology solutions for Network-on-Chips (NoCs) architectures. One potential solution is nanophotonics because of higher bandwidth, reduced power dissipation and increased wiring simplification. In this talk, I will first discuss the characteristics of nanophotonics devices and components and provide motivation for these components to be utilized in future on-chip interconnects. I will then discuss PROPEL, a balanced power and area-efficient on-chip photonic interconnect for future multicores. PROPEL overcomes two fundamental issues facing NoCs architectures, namely power dissipation and area overhead, by a combination of multiplexing techniques (wavelength and space) and by exploiting the recent advances in optical component design space. I will also discuss a scalable version of PROPEL, called E-PROPEL which can scale to 256 cores. Our results indicate that PROPEL and E-PROPEL are power, cost and area- effective networks when compared to competing on-chip optical topologies.Simulation results on synthetic traffic indicate that PROPEL performs better (throughput and power) than electrical and optical topologies.