When Light Bends to the Collective Will: A Theory and Vision for Adaptive Photonic Scale-up Domains
Fuente:
arXiv
Guardado en:
| Autor principal: | |
|---|---|
| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
|
| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
| Etiquetas: |
Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
|
| _version_ | 1866916999174553600 |
|---|---|
| author | Addanki, Vamsi |
| author_facet | Addanki, Vamsi |
| contents | As chip-to-chip silicon photonics gain traction for their bandwidth and energy efficiency, collective communication has emerged as a critical bottleneck in scale-up systems. Programmable photonic interconnects offer a promising path forward: by dynamically reconfiguring the fabric, they can establish direct, high-bandwidth optical paths between communicating endpoints -- \emph{synchronously and guided by the structure of collective operations} (e.g., AllReduce). However, realizing this vision -- \emph{when light bends to the collective will} -- requires navigating a fundamental trade-off between reconfiguration delay and the performance gains of adaptive topologies.
In this paper, we present a simple theoretical framework for adaptive photonic scale-up domains that makes this trade-off explicit and clarifies when reconfiguration is worthwhile. Along the way, we highlight a connection -- not surprising but still powerful -- between the Birkhoff--von Neumann (BvN) decomposition, maximum concurrent flow (a classic measure of network throughput), and the well-known $α$-$β$ cost model for collectives. Finally, we outline a research agenda in algorithm design and systems integration that can build on this foundation. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_08072 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | When Light Bends to the Collective Will: A Theory and Vision for Adaptive Photonic Scale-up Domains Addanki, Vamsi Networking and Internet Architecture Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing As chip-to-chip silicon photonics gain traction for their bandwidth and energy efficiency, collective communication has emerged as a critical bottleneck in scale-up systems. Programmable photonic interconnects offer a promising path forward: by dynamically reconfiguring the fabric, they can establish direct, high-bandwidth optical paths between communicating endpoints -- \emph{synchronously and guided by the structure of collective operations} (e.g., AllReduce). However, realizing this vision -- \emph{when light bends to the collective will} -- requires navigating a fundamental trade-off between reconfiguration delay and the performance gains of adaptive topologies. In this paper, we present a simple theoretical framework for adaptive photonic scale-up domains that makes this trade-off explicit and clarifies when reconfiguration is worthwhile. Along the way, we highlight a connection -- not surprising but still powerful -- between the Birkhoff--von Neumann (BvN) decomposition, maximum concurrent flow (a classic measure of network throughput), and the well-known $α$-$β$ cost model for collectives. Finally, we outline a research agenda in algorithm design and systems integration that can build on this foundation. |
| title | When Light Bends to the Collective Will: A Theory and Vision for Adaptive Photonic Scale-up Domains |
| topic | Networking and Internet Architecture Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08072 |