Optical switchcubes for communications in parallel processors

We propose the concept of an "optical switchcube" to help handling the comm unication load in a parallel computer composed of tens or hundreds of proce ssor clusters operating under the loosely synchronous model of parallel com puting. A switchcube can establish a communication and send one packet of d ata from any node to any combination of the other nodes; several nodes can send data in parallel as long as some mechanism is used to avoid conflicts at the receiver end. A small scale experimental illustration has been imple mented using commercially available acousto-optic technology; a bit error r ate lower than 10(-12) was measured.