Re-architecting DRAM memory systems with monolithically integrated silicon photonics
Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Performance Evaluation of a Multicore System with Optically Connected Memory Modules
NOCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 Fourth ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis
Proceedings of the 38th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Universal optical multi-drop bus for heterogeneous memory architecture
Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers
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We present OCDIMM (Optically Connected DIMM), a CPU-DRAM interface that takes advantage of multiwavelength optical interconnects. We show that OCDIMM has at least three key benefits when compared to alternatives such as FBDIMM (Fully Buffered DIMM), which is used in recent products from Sun [1] and Intel. First, replacing the multi-hop store-and-forward network in the FBDIMM architecture by a WDM (wavelength-division multiplexing) based optical interconnect results in significantly lower latency (up to 50% reduction in some configurations). Second, it is scalable to much higher capacities (such as 32 DIMMs perchannel) with only a modest degradation in latency. Third, due to the higher data rate of an optical interface and the concurrency offered by multiple wavelengths, OCDIMM offers up to a 90% improvement in memory bandwidth. Most importantly, these benefits can be obtained using off-the-shelf DRAM devices, by making simple modifications to the DIMM circuit board and the memory controller.