Development of free-space digital optics in computing

Bulk synchronous parallel computing using a high bandwidth optical interconnect

“…This scalability is provided by the fact that the cost of communicating between the smart-pixel and PC layers is independent of the number of processors. Although the optical bandwidth drops off rapidly with p, according to equation (5), this is not a fundamental problem since the value of optical B can be made substantially larger by using a 2D or 3D layout [11]. While the results in this paper indicate the potential of the system architecture presented and show that the optical bandwidth can be exploited, more detailed quantitative results and a thorough analysis of the system architecture is desirable.…”

Supporting Bulk Synchronous Parallelism with a high‐bandwidth optical interconnect

“…This section models the bandwidth and latency (B optical and L optical ) of the optoelectronic interconnect for a Completely Connected Network (CCN), implemented via a FSOI system. This is constructed using modulator and detector arrays linked by an image relay lensing system as discussed by Dines et al [4] and Gourlay et al in [5]. Typical performance parameters are available from experiments performed at Heriot-Watt University for the FSOI technology considered here.…”

Optoelectronic neural-network scheduler for packet switches

“…In a practical version of the scheduler, we would not use discrete electronics but would employ a smartpixel array. 17,18 Such an array, correctly deployed, would transfer all the communication complexity to the optical domain.…”