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Ultrafast Computer Networking

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Abstract

In recent years research on ‘optics in computing’ has focused increasingly on the use of optical interconnects within future electronic computers, packet switches and routers to enhance their power and performance as stand-alone machines. At the same time, however, the interconnection between computers today has undergone a revolution; the widespread adoption of common network transport protocols has stimulated the rapidly increasing and extensive use of inter-networking, and this is manifest by the explosive growth of the global Internet. Increasingly, intelligence— data, applications, computing power itself—is becoming distributed across networks of machines. The efficiency with which machines are interconnected becomes vitally important for acceptable performance of these advanced distributed applications. The interconnection must certainly provide sufficient bandwidth, but equally important is the need to minimise latency. A simple and common example of the inadequacy of today’s computer networks is the frustratingly poor performance often experienced by users of the Worldwide Web. Increasingly in the future there will be a demand for multi-media applications that can operate with a slick and seamless interface to the network, and that provide long interaction periods with human immersion in computer generated environments, synthesised from wide-ranging distributed intelligence. There will also be an increasing volume of computer-to-computer interaction with little human intervention, using software agents. For these applications, interconnection latency must be minimised and should ideally be dominated by the fundamental delay due to the optical transmission time-of-flight.

© 1997 Optical Society of America

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