Recent advances in integrated photonics enable the implementation of reconfigurable, high-bandwidth, and low energy-per-bit interconnects in next-generation data centers. We propose and evaluate an Optically Connected Memory (OCM) architecture that disaggregates the main memory from the computation nodes in data centers. OCM is based on micro-ring resonators (MRRs), and it does not require any modification to the DRAM memory modules. We calculate energy consumption from real photonic devices and integrate them into a system simulator to evaluate performance. Our results show that (1) OCM is capable of interconnecting four DDR4 memory channels to a computing node using two fibers with 1.07 pJ energy-per-bit consumption and (2) OCM performs up to 5.5x faster than a disaggregated memory with 40G PCIe NIC connectors to computing nodes.
@article{arxiv.2008.10802,
title = {Optically Connected Memory for Disaggregated Data Centers},
author = {Jorge Gonzalez and Alexander Gazman and Maarten Hattink and Mauricio G. Palma and Meisam Bahadori and Ruth Rubio-Noriega and Lois Orosa and Madeleine Glick and Onur Mutlu and Keren Bergman and Rodolfo Azevedo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10802},
year = {2020}
}