A scalable and pipelined embedded signal processing system using optical hypercube interconnects

In this paper, we propose a system suitable for embedded signal processing with extreme performance demands. The system consists of several computational modules that work independently and send data simultaneously in order to achieve high throughput. Each computational module is composed of multiple processors connected in a hypercube topology to meet scalability and high bisection bandwidth requirements. Free-space optical interconnects and planar packaging technology make it possible to transform the hypercubes into planes and to take advantage of many optical properties. For instance, optical fan-out reduces hardware cost. This, altogether, makes the system capable of meeting high performance demands in, e.g., massively parallel signal processing. An example system with eleven computational modules and an overall peak performance greater than 2.8 TFLOPS is presented. The effective inter-module bandwidth in this configuration is 1,024 Gbit/s