Latency-avoiding Dynamic Optical Circuit Prefetching Using Application-specific

Abstract. Optical circuits are capable of providing large bandwidth im-provements relative to electrical-switched networks in high-performance computing (HPC) systems. However, due to the circuit switching nature of optical systems, setup delays may prevent HPC systems from fully utilizing the available bandwidth. This paper proposes an application-guided circuit management technique that can achieve latency-avoiding dynamic reconfiguration, better leveraging the high-bandwidth photon-ics and accelerating system performance. By learning the temporal lo-cality and communication patterns from upper-layer applications, the technique not only caches a set of circuits to maximize reuse, but also prefetches predicted circuits to actively hide the setup latency. We apply the technique to communication patterns from a spectrum of science and engineering applications. The results show that setup delays via circuit misses are significantly reduced, showing how the proposed technique can improve circuit switching in HPC optical interconnects