Optically Connected Memory for Disaggregated Data Centers

2020/08/25 by Gonzalez, Jorge, Gazman, Alexander, Hattink, Maarten +8 · 2 citations
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Hardware Architecture (cs.AR)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.10802

Abstract

Recent advances in integrated photonics enable the implementation of reconfigurable, high-bandwidth, and low energy-per-bit interconnects in next-generation data centers. We propose and evaluate an Optically Connected Memory (OCM) architecture that disaggregates the main memory from the computation nodes in data centers. OCM is based on micro-ring resonators (MRRs), and it does not require any modification to the DRAM memory modules. We calculate energy consumption from real photonic devices and integrate them into a system simulator to evaluate performance. Our results show that (1) OCM is capable of interconnecting four DDR4 memory channels to a computing node using two fibers with 1.07 pJ energy-per-bit consumption and (2) OCM performs up to 5.5x faster than a disaggregated memory with 40G PCIe NIC connectors to computing nodes.

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