Performance potentials of an optical fiber bus using wavelength division multiplexing

Optical fiber busses supporting multiple concurrently usable channels through the use of wavelength division multiplexing can meet the demanding interconnection requirements of high performance multiprocessors. Using a simple analytical model, we establish why global channel access protocols for the WDM channels are inadequate for a WDM optical fiber bus. We propose a simple WDM bus that supports a small number of channels and uses readily available receivers and transmitters with fixed tunings. A simple channel allocation and arbitration strategy allows up to 100 processors to be connected using a single WDM bus with only 5 WDM channels. Simulated performance shows that the bus does not become a bottleneck even when 100 processors are connected. The WDM channels also allow cache coherence and processor synchronization to be easily supported, making the bus feature-compatible with the IEEE Futurebus+ and SCI standards.