Optical interconnections for parallel and distributed computing

Abstract
This paper reports the application of optical interconnections to a parallel an distributed computing system in the form of a calibration-free 64-Gbps/board parallel optical interconnection sub-system mounted directly on the four-CPU processor board of a newly developed parallel-processing machine, "RWC-1". The sub-system is composed of eight parallel optical module/single-chip link large-scale integrated circuit pairs. The subsystem successfully transmitted parallel data for a variety of link lengths (between 1 m and 1 km), and with deskewing and synchronizing functions, phase-matching calibration for link lengths is automatic. Further, a method is described for the simplified merging of optical interconnections into electronic systems.