The Bright Future for HPC Interconnects -- Opportunities, Challenges, and Misconceptions in Deployment and Management of Large-Scale Networks
Tuesday, June 29, 2021 1:15 PM to 1:35 PM · 20 min. (Africa/Abidjan)
Stream#1
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Contributors:
Abstract:
Moving forward, the transition to more and more photonics-based interconnects for off-chip communication, as well as potentially on-chip communication, is inevitable. The theoretical advantages of tera- or petabit-per-second transmissions over all-optical networks for bandwidth-demanding or latency-sensitive applications are clear, and will be required to bridge the long neglected and widening gap between network, memory, and compute performance. This talk will highlight the state-of-the-art in off-chip HPC interconnects: how they are deployed (physically and topologically), and how they are managed and maintained. Furthermore, an outlook will be given of whether our existing knowledge and infrastructure remains applicable in the changing landscape of high-performance interconnects, or if we will have to reinvent the wheel. All in all, hyperscale optical networks, either uniform or hierarchical, pose exciting research challenges for the next years w.r.t. resilience, software configuration, feature support, and deployment plus maintainability, as demonstrated in this presentation.
Abstract:
Moving forward, the transition to more and more photonics-based interconnects for off-chip communication, as well as potentially on-chip communication, is inevitable. The theoretical advantages of tera- or petabit-per-second transmissions over all-optical networks for bandwidth-demanding or latency-sensitive applications are clear, and will be required to bridge the long neglected and widening gap between network, memory, and compute performance. This talk will highlight the state-of-the-art in off-chip HPC interconnects: how they are deployed (physically and topologically), and how they are managed and maintained. Furthermore, an outlook will be given of whether our existing knowledge and infrastructure remains applicable in the changing landscape of high-performance interconnects, or if we will have to reinvent the wheel. All in all, hyperscale optical networks, either uniform or hierarchical, pose exciting research challenges for the next years w.r.t. resilience, software configuration, feature support, and deployment plus maintainability, as demonstrated in this presentation.
