SearchPublisher and Institutes
You are here: Home :: Area NEM :: Computer science
Ulrich Brüning, Ulrich Krackhardt
Systems for High-Efficient Electrical and Optical Short-Distance Data Transmission in System-Area-Networks
The increasing requirement for computing performance has lead to distributed computing besides an improvement of single systems. The distributed resources may be arranged in clusters (LAN regime) or in specialized boards or racks (SAN regime). The performance of distributed systems is limited by interconnection and no more by computing power. An electrical and an optical interconnection device will be discussed as an example for broad-band interconnections with little latency and without external control.
The electrical system is a PCI-X network card named ATOLL (atomic low latency), which carries out the complete protocol management, error-correction and routing. A bi-directional 4×4 cross-bar with aggregate bandwidth of 2 GByte/s is provided.
For optical board-to-board or rack-to-rack signal transmission a fiber optical multiplexed system is discussed. The multiplexing is performed by passive optical components, only. One single standard fiber can be used for 12 to 16 multiplexed channels with an accumulated bandwidth in the 1 THz×m region. The system is realized with micro-integrated optical modules and standard fiber-optical interfaces.
it – Information Technology (vormals it+ti), Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag
Print ISSN: 1611-2776
Volume: 45, 02/2003
Pages: 065