Speaker:

Gerhard P. Fettweis, TU Dresden, Germany

Title:

Massive Interconnect Architectures for Massive Manycore Computing Systems

Abstract:

Manycore systems architecture solutions will become available with clearly more than 1 million cores. However, the key for harvesting this massive amount of compute power is to design completely new interconnect and backplane solutions. For this, three main high-speed connection solutions must be found, namely backplanes, on-board interconnects, as well as 3D chip-stack intra-connects. 1) Today, backplane data rates are in the order of 100Gb/s. We show how this can be improved by 3 orders of magnitude with a radically new wireless backplane technology. 2) Today, on-board connections are typically designed in copper. We envisage how all-optical connections are a possible way forward to massively increase bandwidth and reduce power consumption. 3) Today, TSV based wide-IO has been introduced for connecting chiplets within a 3D chip-stack. We propose wireless intraconnects based on capacitive and inductive coupling, requiring TSVs to be used mainly for power supply only. When embracing this 3-fold approach of achieving new massive interconnect radically new computing architectures can be envisaged. Systems are foreseeable that host the power of 1 billion cores within one liter housing.

Bio:

Gerhard Fettweis earned his Ph.D. under H. Meyr's supervision from RWTH Aachen in 1990. Thereafter he was one year at IBM Research in San Jose, CA and then at TCSI Inc., Berkeley, CA. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, Germany, with currently 20 companies from Asia/Europe/US sponsoring his research on wireless transmission and chip design. Gerhard is IEEE Fellow, member of acatech, has received an honorary doctorate, and multiple awards. In Dresden he has spun-out nine start-ups so far, and setup funded projects exceeding EUR 1/4 billion volume. He has been actively involved in organizing IEEE conferences, most notably being TPC Chair of IEEE ICC 2009, TTM 2012, and General Chair of VTC Spring 2013. He remains active within IEEE societies as well as their publications.