Small depth beam-steered optical interconnect

An optical beam steering mechanism augments an optical perfect shuffle in a proposed small depth interconnect. In an abstract view, a beam is quickly steered directly from any source to any destination. In practice, beam steering is limited to only a small number of positions, and is limited to slow steering speeds. The limited number of steering positions is compensated by changing the topologies of the communication graphs to match the topology of the interconnect. Applications generally exhibit a degree of communication locality that offsets the time spent in reconfiguration, and so the slow steering speed is not a serious drawback of the approach as long as the beam steering speed is matched with a period of stasis after reconfiguration.