Modeling and analysis of the performance of exascale photonic networks

Summary Photonics technology has become a promising and viable alternative for both on‐chip and off‐chip interconnection networks of future Exascale systems. Nevertheless, this technology is not mature enough yet in this context, so research efforts focusing on photonic networks are still required to achieve realistic suitable network implementations. In this regard, system‐level photonic network simulators can help guide designers to assess the multiple design choices. Most current research is done on electrical network simulators, whose components work widely different from photonics components. In this work, we summarize and compare the working behavior of both technologies which includes the use of optical routers, wavelength‐division multiplexing and circuit switching among others. After implementing them into a well‐known simulation framework, an extensive simulation study has been carried out using realistic photonic network configurations with synthetic and realistic traffic. Experimental results show that, compared to electrical networks, optical networks can reduce the execution time of the studied real workloads in almost one order of magnitude. Our study also reveals that the photonic configuration highly impacts on the network performance, being the bandwidth per channel and the message length the most important parameters.