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Energy-Proportional Photonic Interconnects

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Nikos HardavellasAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), Volume 13, Issue 4

Article No.: 54, Pages 1 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/3018110

Published: 28 December 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Photonic interconnects have emerged as the prime candidate technology for efficient networks on chip at future process nodes. However, the high optical loss of many nanophotonic components coupled with the low efficiency of current laser sources results in exceedingly high total power requirements for the laser. As optical interconnects stay on even during periods of system inactivity, most of this power is wasted, which has prompted research on laser gating. Unfortunately, prior work has been complicated by the long laser turn-on delays and has failed to deliver the full savings. In this article, we propose ProLaser, a laser control mechanism that monitors the requests sent on the interconnect, the cache, and the coherence directory to detect highly correlated events and turn on proactively the lasers of a photonic interconnect. While ProLaser requires fast lasers with a turn-on delay of a few nanoseconds, a technology that is still experimental, several types of such lasers that are suitable for power gating have already been manufactured over the last decade. Overall, ProLaser saves 42% to 85% of the laser power, outperforms the current state of the art by 2× on average, and closely tracks (within 2%--6%) a perfect prediction scheme with full knowledge of future interconnect requests. Moreover, the power savings of ProLaser allow the cores to exploit a higher-power budget and run faster, achieving speedups of 1.5 to 1.7× (1.6× on average).

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Cited By

Han HAlexoudi TVagionas CPleros NHardavellas N(2022)A Practical Shared Optical Cache With Hybrid MWSR/R-SWMR NoC for Multicore ProcessorsACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems10.1145/353101218:4(1-28)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3531012

Index Terms

Energy-Proportional Photonic Interconnects
1. Hardware

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cover image ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization

ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization Volume 13, Issue 4

December 2016

648 pages

ISSN:1544-3566

EISSN:1544-3973

DOI:10.1145/3012405

Editor:
Koen De Bosschere
Ghent University

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Publication History

Published: 28 December 2016

Accepted: 01 November 2016

Revised: 01 October 2016

Received: 01 June 2016

Published in TACO Volume 13, Issue 4

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Han HAlexoudi TVagionas CPleros NHardavellas N(2022)A Practical Shared Optical Cache With Hybrid MWSR/R-SWMR NoC for Multicore ProcessorsACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems10.1145/353101218:4(1-28)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3531012

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