Quantitative analysis on the computing performance improvement by parallel optical interconnection

This paper compares the optical and electrical interconnect systems by analyzing the efficiency and evaluating the total processing time, and design an experiment to demonstrate this performance promotion. With the increasing demand on large-scale parallel computing tasks, data transmission instead of data computing has become more and more important, so the rapid development of optical chip-to-chip interconnects techniques has gotten more attention. In this paper, we take fast Fourier transform (FFT) computation as an example to study whether and how the optical interconnection has influence on the computing performance, and three topology models are used to judging the transmission latency, and the relationship between the total processing time and the FFT points is also under investigation. Both results show parallel optical interconnection can bring large advantages in promoting computing performance. It is also found that the larger the transmission scale is, the more saving optical interconnection makes.