HERMES: A Hierarchical Broadcast-Based Silicon Photonic Interconnect for Scalable Many-Core Systems

Optical interconnection networks, as enabled by recent advances in silicon photonic device and fabrication technology, have the potential to address on-chip and off-chip communication bottlenecks in many-core systems. Although several designs have shown superior power efficiency and performance compared to electrical alternatives, these networks will not scale to the thousands of cores required in the future. In this paper, we introduce Hermes, a hybrid network composed of an optimized broadcast for power-efficient low-latency global-scale coordination and circuit-switch sub-networks for high-throughput data delivery. This network will scale for use in thousand core chip systems. At the physical level, SoI-based adiabatic coupler has been designed to provide low-loss and compact optical power splitting. Based on the adiabatic coupler, a topology based on 2-ary folded butterfly is designed to provide linear power division in a thousand core layout with minimal cross-overs. To address the network agility and provide for efficient use of optical bandwidth, a flow control and routing mechanism is introduced to dynamically allocate bandwidth and provide fairness usage of network resources. At the system level, bloom filter-based filtering for localization of communication are designed for reducing global traffic. In addition, a novel greedy-based data and workload migration are leveraged to increase the locality of communication in a NUCA (non-uniform cache access) architecture. First order analytic evaluation results have indicated that Hermes is scalable to at least 1024 cores and offers significant performance improvement and power savings over prior silicon photonic designs.