Virtual multi-channel optical ring for computer cluster

A giga-bit per second optical ring has been designed. The data link layer bandwidth of the network is 1.5 Gbit/s. Hardware routing has been achieved by field programmable gate array (FPGA) to minimize the communication latency. As a result, the point-to-point communication latency between adjacent node computers is less than 300 ns. To reduce the data communication latency and have a more efficient usage of the data link layer bandwidth, virtual multi-channel transmission mechanism has been achieved with hardware. The network supports a maximum of four virtual channels for each physical data link. Time slots can be dynamically assigned to each virtual channel. The length of each time slot can also be dynamically selected based on the length of each data packets. Zero wait time has been achieved for the switching between different virtual channels. The relationship between the network performance and the number of virtual channels has also been analyzed in this paper.