LOCALITY-BASED CONTROL ALGORITHMS FOR RECONFIGURABLE OPTICAL INTERCONNECTION NETWORKS

Hybrid optoelectronic computing structures are required for providing the information processing capabilities for the next generation of com puting and communications systems. Reconfigurable optoelectronic inter connection networks are networks constructed of optical waveguides in which messages are switched or routed by means of optoelectronic devic es. For these networks, the dichotomy between the bandwidth of the opt ical channels that carry messages and the performance of the electroni c controllers and decoders that determine the routing and destination of those messages is a significant bottleneck. We introduce a class of routing algorithms for reconfigurable networks that is designed to br idge this pp in optical versus electronic performance. The algorithms are based on a new control paradigm that exploits the locality in mult iprocessor communication streams to reduce the control latency inheren t in reconfigurable interconnection structures. In addition, we show t hat this problem maps directly to the problem of page replacement in a virtual-memory hierarchy. Thus our solution is well suited to network s for multiprocessor applications.