Direct-modulated optical networks for interposer systems

We present a new interposer-level optical network based on direct-modulated lasers such as vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) or transistor lasers (TLs). Our key observation is that, the physics of these lasers is such that they must transmit significantly more power (21x) than is needed by the receiver. We take advantage of this excess optical power to create a new network architecture called Rome, which splits optical signals using passive splitters to allow flexible bandwidth allocation among different transmitter and receiver pairs while imposing minimal power and design costs. Using multi-chip module GPUs (MCM-GPUs) as a case study, we thoroughly evaluate network power and performance, and show that (1) Rome is capable of efficiently scaling up MCM-GPUs with up to 1024 streaming multiprocessors, and (2) Rome outperforms various competing designs in terms of energy efficiency (by up to 4x) and performance (by up to 143%).