MULTIPROCESSOR SYSTEM USING AN AUTOMATICALLY REARRANGEABLE FREE-SPACE MULTICHANNEL OPTICAL SWITCH - COSINE-2

Free-space optical interconnection is an attractive technique for interprocessor communications in future multiprocessor systems. The previously developed multiprocessor system, COSINE-1 (computer systems employing optical spatial interconnections for experimentation-1), used manually reconfigured board-to-board free-space optical interconnections. This paper describes COSINE-2, an advanced version of COSINE-1. COSINE-2 employs a rearrangeable 128 x 128 free-space multichannel optical switch implemented with a polarization-multiplexing technique. The optical switch offers full flexibility for reconfiguring the processor network. A system is built and experimentally confirmed to be completely reliable. System operations including processor network reconfiguration are successfully performed.