On the performance investigation of a fast optical switches based optical high performance computing infrastructure

Optical networks based on fast optical switches (FOSes) could potentially solve the latency, bandwidth, cost and power consumption challenges in current electrical switches (ESes) based high performance computing (HPC) networks. In this work, we present a novel HPC network which employs distributed FOS interconnecting by removing ES (Firefly). In Firefly, Dragonfly topology is adopted for the inter-group connection of blades, while the intra-group connection of blades is implemented by FOS with fast optical flow control. The Firefly exploits the wavelength, space, and time switching domain with nanoseconds reconfiguration time of the FOS to achieve efficient statistical multiplexing operation. We numerically investigate the Firefly performance with real HPC traffic traces collected by running multiple computing applications in MareNostrum 3 HPC infrastructure with Leaf-Spine architecture. Compared with Leaf Spine architecture, results show that Firefly performs 62.4%, 54%, 68.6%, and 71.8% less latency for the applications Conjugate Gradient (CG), Multi-Grid (MG), Multiple Instruction Lattice Computation (MILC), and Miniature Molecular Dynamics (MINI_MD), respectively. Moreover, Firefly can save 56.4% cost and 65.7% power consumption, respectively, with respect to Leaf-Spine when both support around 10,000 blades.