Optical design of a fault tolerant self-routing switch for massively parallel processing networks

A fault-tolerant high-performance optical 2/spl times/2 switch is proposed for massively parallel processing network applications. The switch is designed using all optical components. This allows the exploitation of spatial parallelism. The proposed switch can be used with any multistage interconnection network such as omega, Banyan, shuffle, Benes. For the purpose of this study the baseline network was used as the underlying network. The reasons for choosing the baseline are that it uses 2/spl times/2 switches, is not fault-tolerant and is self-routing. Performance/reliability analysis is done and compared with two major fault-tolerant networks. The results show that without redundant switches, better network survivability is achieved. Since the network is assembled using only the 2/spl times/2 switches, it can be mass produced.