OMULT: An optical interconnection system for parallel computing

In this paper, we introduce a new interconnection system OMULT (Optical Multi-Trees) using both electronic and optical links among processors. The processors are organized in the form of an n X n array of trees, each containing 2n-1 nodes with n leaf nodes. The total number of nodes is 2n(3)-n(2). Nodes in a single tree are connected by usual electronic links, while the leaf nodes of different trees are suitably interconnected by bi-directional optical links in both horizontal and vertical directions. The resulting network topology is almost 3-regular with an 0(log n) diameter and the maximum node degree of only three. We show that the common computations on multiprocessors can be carried out faster on this architecture compared to OTIS - a recent proposal also using optical communication.