Paper Info
Title
Cross-layer Energy and Performance Evaluation of a Nanophotonic Manycore Processor System Using Real Application Workloads
Abstract
Recent advances in nanophotonic device research have led to a proliferation of proposals for new architectures that employ optics for on-chip communication. However, since standard simulation tools have not yet caught up with these advances, the quality and thoroughness of the evaluations of these architectures have varied widely. This paper provides the first complete end-to-end analysis of an architecture using on-chip optical interconnect. This analysis incorporates realistic performance and energy models for both electrical and optical devices and circuits into a full-fledged functional simulator, thus enabling detailed analyses when running actual applications. Since on-chip optics is not yet mature and unlikely to see widespread use for several more years, we perform our analysis on a future 1000-core processor implemented in an 11nm technology node. We find that the proposed optical interconnect can provide between 1.8x and 4.8x better energy-delay product than conventional electrical-only interconnects. In addition, based on a detailed energy breakdown of all processor components, we conclude that a thermal ring resonators and on-chip lasers that allow rapid power gating are key areas worthy of additional nanophotonic research. This will help guide future optical device research to the areas likely to provide the best payoff.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/IPDPS.2012.103
IPDPS
Keywords
Field
DocType
on-chip optic,optical device,real application workloads,on-chip laser,additional nanophotonic research,complete end-to-end analysis,cross-layer energy,nanophotonic device research,nanophotonic manycore processor system,detailed analysis,performance evaluation,1000-core processor,future optical device research,on-chip communication,nanophotonics,electrical circuits,routing,photonics,system on a chip,unicast,cache coherence
Manycore processor,System on a chip,Computer science,Optical ring resonators,Parallel computing,Nanophotonics,Power gating,Photonics,Cache coherence,Optical interconnect
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1530-2075
978-1-4673-0975-2
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.56
0
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
George Kurian150517.56
Chen Sun227414.48
Owen Chia-Hsin Chen350718.69
Jason E. Miller423010.31
Jurgen Michel51093.68
Lan Wei6467.70
Dimitri A. Antoniadis721739.43
Li-Shiuan Peh85077398.57
Lionel C. Kimerling91094.02
Vladimir Stojanovic101410155.48
Anant Agarwal114258483.35