FEASIBLE INTERCONNECTION SCHEMES FOR VERY HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING. AN IMPLEMENTATION STUDY FOR NEAR-PETAFLOPS PERFORMANCE by SOTIRIOS G. ZIAVRAS ECE and CIS Departments NJIT A Point Design is presented for a DSM computer capable of gracious 100 TeraFLOPS performance with technology expected to be available before 2005. Its scalability guarantees a lifetime extending well into the next century. Our design takes advantage of free-space optical technologies to produce a 1-D building block (BB) that implements efficiently a dense fully-connected system. A 2-D structure is proposed for the complete system, where this 1-D BB is extended into two dimensions. This architecture behaves like a 2-D generalized hypercube, which is characterized by outstanding performance and extremely high wiring complexity that prohibits its electronics-only implementation. A mesh of clear plastic/glass bars in our design facilitate bit-parallel transmissions that utilize wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and follow dedicated optical paths. Each node of the generalized hypercube is a fully-connected system of eight processors. The processors are interconnected locally with an electronic crossbar. Using time-division multiplexing (TDM) the eight processors share the same interface to the optical medium. Encouraging results for application algorithms show that our design could have a tremendous, positive impact on very high performance computing. An impressive property of our system is that its bisection bandwidth matches, within an order of magnitude, the maximum performance of its computation engine. ------------ The NJIT New Millennium Computing Point Design is one of the eight projects nationwide funded by NSF, DARPA, and NASA. The objective is to design a computer capable of 100 TeraFLOPS in 2005. BIOGRAPHY S. Ziavras received the Diploma in EE from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (1984) and the D.Sc. degree in Computer Science from George Washington University (1990), where he was a Distinguished Graduate Teaching Assistant. From 1988 to 1989, he was also with the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland, College Park, doing research in Parallel Computer Vision. He was with the RISO National Research Laboratory of Denmark in 1983, doing research in Interactive Computer Graphics. He was a visiting Assistant Professor of ECE at George Mason University in Spring 1990. He joined NJIT in Fall 1990 as an Assistant Professor. He is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Computer and Information Science(CIS). He received an excellence award from the Hellenic Republic in 1984, the Richard E. Merwin Ph.D. Fellowship in 1986, and an NSF Research Initiation Award in 1991. In 1996 he was the PI for an NSF/DARPA-funded (co-sponsored by NASA) New Millennium Computing Point Design project. He is an Associate Editor of the Pattern Recognition journal. He has authored more than 55 refereed papers. He is listed in Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in the East. He has served on the Program Committees of several International Conferences. His research interests are interconnection networks, parallel computers and algorithms, advanced computer architecture, and computer vision. He is a member of the IEEE (Senior), Pattern Recognition Society, ACM, New York Academy of Sciences, Greek Chamber of Engineers, and Eta Kappa Nu. ======================================================= | Sotirios G. Ziavras | | Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer | | Engineering, and Computer and Information Science | | | | ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE | | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering | | New Jersey Institute of Technology | | University Heights | | Newark, New Jersey 07102, USA | | -------------------------------------------------- | | Tel: (201) 596-5651 | | Fax: (201) 596-5680 | | Internet: ziavras@megahertz.njit.edu |