Flex-LIONS: a Silicon Photonic Bandwidth-Reconfigurable Optical Switch Fabric

This paper summarizes our recent studies on architecture, photonic integration, system validation and networking performance analysis of a flexible low-latency interconnect optical network switch (FlexLIONS) for datacenter and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Flex-LIONS leverages the all-to-all wavelength routing property in arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) combined with microring resonator (MRR)-based add/drop filtering and multi-wavelength spatial switching to enable topology and bandwidth reconfigurability to adapt the interconnection to different traffic profiles. By exploiting the multiple free spectral ranges of AWGRs, it is also possible to provide reconfiguration while maintaining minimum-diameter all-to-all interconnectivity. We report experimental results on the design, fabrication, and system testing of 8 × 8 silicon photonic (SiPh) Flex-LIONS chips demonstrating error-free all-to-all communication and reconfiguration exploiting different free spectral ranges (FSR0 and FSR1, respectively). After reconfiguration in FSR1, the bandwidth between the selected pair of nodes is increased from 50 Gb/s to 125 Gb/s while an all interconnectivity at 25 Gb/s is maintained using FSR0. Finally, we investigate the use of Flex-LIONS in two different networking scenarios. First, networking simulations for a 256-node datacenter inter-rack communication scenario show the potential latency and energy benefits when using Flex-LIONS for optical reconfiguration based on different traffic profiles (a legacy fat-tree architecture is used for comparison). Second, we demonstrate the benefits of leveraging two FSRs in an 8-node 64-core computing system to provide reconfiguration for the hotspot nodes while maintaining minimum-diameter all-to-all interconnectivity.