Corona: System Implications of Emerging Nanophotonic Technology

We expect that many-core microprocessors will push performance per chip from the 10 gigaflop to the 10 teraflop range in the coming decade. To support this increased performance, memory and inter-core bandwidths will also have to scale by orders of magnitude. Pin limitations, the energy cost of electrical signaling, and the non-scalability of chip-length global wires are significant bandwidth impediments. Recent developments in silicon nanophotonic technology have the potential to meet these off- and on-stack bandwidth requirements at acceptable power levels. Corona is a 3D many-core architecture that uses nanophotonic communication for both inter-core communication and off-stack communication to memory or I/O devices. Its peak floating-point performance is 10 teraflops. Dense wavelength division multiplexed optically connected memory modules provide 10 terabyte per second memory bandwidth. A photonic crossbar fully interconnects its 256 low-power multithreaded cores at 20 teraby...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Dana Vantrease, Robert Schreiber, Matteo Monchiero, Moray McLaren, Norman P. Jouppi, Marco Fiorentino, Al Davis, Nathan L. Binkert, Raymond G. Beausoleil, Jung Ho Ahn
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 2008, Many-core, Many-core Microprocessors, Significant Bandwidth Impediments