Research Of High-speed Optical Interconnection Data-link And Network For Computer Cluster System

High-bandwidth low-latency data link and network has been widely adopted inthe field of parallel computing, distributed database, industrial controlling and imagemonitoring systems. It has become an important branch of the research in computercommunication techniques. In this thesis, high-speed optical transmission techniqueshave been implemented in computer interconnection system. Communication networkfor PCs or workstations has been realized which can use the full bandwidth of PCI(Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus. An optical ring and point-to-point data linkhave been developed, based on the previous work in optical interconnection of ourresearch group. A specific communication protocol is designed for the opticalinterconnection network. System software realizing the protocol is also developed. AMEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanics System) optical switch based network is completedusing star and ring hybrid topology. The following are main achievements of this thesis: 1. Based on the architecture of fiber-optic data link and network, a communication model has been established. A new optical network interface card (ONIC) has been designed, in which simplex data transmission was achieved and power dissipation was reduced. Design of the PCB has been optimized according to the principle of signal integrity. As a result, the working frequency of ONIC has been doubled. 2. Utilizing the theory and design method of modern EDA technique, the design of the FPGA logic is optimized. Both 33MHz and 66MHz clock is used in the FPGA (Field Programmable Gates Array). The transmission rate of the link was up to full bandwidth of the PCI bus. 3. As a cluster network must satisfy the need of high bandwidth and low latency, a specific communication protocol was designed and realized. The WDM (Windows Driver Model) device driver and network application program for the Windows operating system were developed. 4. The performance of the data-link and network was tested. And a comparison with several leading cluster networks was carried out. The communication latency of the optical interconnection ring network was analyzed with the LogP (Latency, overhead, gap and Processor) model. IIThe network's data-rate in application layer was beyond 465Mbit/s. It has the characteristic of high-bandwidth, low-latency, high performance to cost ratio. And its general performance was comparable with similar techniques in the word.The following are major innovations of this thesis:1. The network function of the ONIC is modified, dynamic reconfiguration of the physical address of the ONIC has been realized, and interrupt can be generated on receiving data.2. New communication protocol and frame structure for the network were designed. A life element was added in the bottom layer frame header preventing illegal frame transmitting in the fiber- optic ring infinitely.3. The controlling registers of the ONIC and system common buffer for DMA transmission were mapped into the user memory space, so that the latency of the operating system was bypassed. Zero copy in DMA transmitting and receiving was realized. The software overhead is decreased significantly.