Exploiting optical waveguides in general-purpose parallel computing
M. H. Davis, Umakishore Ramachandran · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
We motivate our interest in examining how optics can be used in a class of general purpose parallel computer architectures called Distributed Shared Memory (DSM). We describe an abstract DSM architecture called Beehive that incorporates a weak memory model called Buffered Consistency. We propose a specific optical implementation of Beehive called OBee. This optical implementation uses optical waveguides to implement an interconnection network called Optical Broadcast Rings (OBRs). The OBRs are used in OBee as part of the hybrid electronic/optical hardware support for cache coherency and three types of synchronization (locks, barriers, and combining F&OPs). We also use the OBRs to propose purely optical hardware support for the locks and barriers.© (1993) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.