RECONFIGURABLE INTELLIGENT OPTICAL BACKPLANE FOR PARALLEL COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATIONS

A reconfigurable intelligent optical backplane architecture for parall el computing and communications is described. The backplane consists o f a large number of reconfigurable optical channels organized in a rin g with relatively simple point-to-point optical interconnections betwe en neighboring smart-pixel arrays. The intelligent backplane can imple ment (1) dynamically reconfigurable connections between any printed ci rcuit boards, (2) dynamic embeddings of classical interconnection netw orks such as buses, rings, multidimensional meshes, hypercubes, shuffl es, and crossbars, (3) multipoint switching, (4) sorting, (5) parallel -prefix operations, (6) pattern-matching operations, (7) snoopy caches and intelligent memory systems, and (8) media-access control function s. The smart-pixel arrays can be enhanced to include more complex func tions, such as queuing and routing, as the technologies mature. Descri ptions of the architecture and the smart-pixel arrays and discussions of the system cost, availability, and performance are included.