text: Advances in CMOS-compatible photonic elements have made it plausible to exploit nanophotonic communications to overcome the limitations of traditional NoCs. Amongst various proposed nanophotonic architectures, optical crossbars have been shown to provide high performance in terms of bandwidth and latency. In general, optical crossbars provide a vast volume of network resources that are shared among all the cores within the chip. In this paper, we present a fair and efficient admission control mechanism for shared wavelengths and buffer space in optical crossbars. We model buffer management and wavelength assignment as a utility-based convex optimization problem, whose solution determines the admission control policy. Thanks to efficient convex optimization techniques, we obtain the globally optimal solution of the admission control optimization problem by using simple and yet efficient iterative algorithms. We cast our solution procedure as an iterative algorithm to be implemented a central admission controller. Our experimental results corroborate the gain that can be obtained by using such an admission controller to manage the shared resources of the system. Furthermore, they confirm that the proposed admission control algorithm works well for various traffic patterns and parameters, and evinces a tractable scalability with increase in the number of cores of the crossbar.
  @cite_28: Based on current trends, multicore processors will have 1000 cores or more within the next decade. However, their promise of increased performance will only be realized if their inherent scaling and programming challenges are overcome. Fortunately, recent advances in nanophotonic device manufacturing are making CMOS-integrated optics a reality-interconnect technology which can provide significantly more bandwidth at lower power than conventional electrical signaling. Optical interconnect has the potential to enable massive scaling and preserve familiar programming models in future multicore chips. This paper presents ATAC, a new multicore architecture with integrated optics, and ACKwise, a novel cache coherence protocol designed to leverage ATAC's strengths. ATAC uses nanophotonic technology to implement a fast, efficient global broadcast network which helps address a number of the challenges that future multicores will face. ACKwise is a new directory-based cache coherence protocol that uses this broadcast mechanism to provide high performance and scalability. Based on 64-core and 1024-core simulations with Splash2, Parsec, and synthetic benchmarks, we show that ATAC with ACKwise out-performs a chip with conventional interconnect and cache coherence protocols. On 1024-core evaluations, ACKwise protocol on ATAC outperforms the best conventional cache coherence protocol on an electrical mesh network by 2.5x with Splash2 benchmarks and by 61 with synthetic benchmarks.
  @cite_15: Chip multiprocessor (CMP) is becoming an attractive platform for applications seeking both high performance and high energy efficiency. In large-scale CMPs, the communication efficiency among cores is crucial for the overall system performance and energy consumption. In this article, we propose a ring-based optical network-on-chip, called SUOR, to fulfill the communication requirement of CMPs. SUOR effectively explores the distinctive properties of optical signals and photonic devices, and dynamically partitions each data channel into multiple sections. Each section can be utilized independently to boost performance as well as reduce energy consumption. We develop a set of distributed control protocols and algorithms for SUOR, but physically allocate the corresponding cluster agents close to each other to benefit from the strengths of optical interconnects at long distances as well as electrical interconnects at short distances. Simulation results show that SUOR outperforms the alternative optical networks under a wide range of traffic patterns. For example, compared with MWSR design, SUOR achieves 2.58× throughput as well as saves 64p energy consumption on average in a 256-core CMP. Compared with MWMR design, SUOR achieves 1.52× throughput and reduces 73p energy consumption on average.
summary: ATAC @cite_28 is another hybrid architecture in which a baseline electrical 2D mesh is used for close-range point-to-point communications, whereas a ring-like optical network is used for long-distance and collective communications. The optical interconnect functions in a similar way as a broadcast bus, and contention is resolved by assigning unique wavelengths to senders. SUOR, proposed by @cite_15 , uses a circuit-switched ring-based optical NoC with a control sub-system responsible for arbitration and flow control. The control sub-system sets up the path from source to destination based on the requests received from nodes. SOUR also takes advantage of channel segmentation by dividing one waveguide into multiple non-overlapping sections that can support multiple transactions simultaneously.