POSTER: BigBus: A Scalable Optical Interconnect

Abstract

This paper presents BigBus, a novel on-chip photonic network for a 1024 node system. The crux of the idea is to segment the entire system into smaller clusters of nodes, and adopt a hybrid strategy for each segment that includes conventional laser modulation, as well as a novel technique for sharing power across nodes dynamically. We represent energy internally as tokens, where one token will allow a node to send a message to any other node in its cluster. We allow optical stations to arbitrate for tokens and at a global level, we predict the number of token equivalents of power that the off-chip laser needs to generate.