Workshops Archive

Opening Invited Talk: Photonics-Enabled Systems for the Disaggregated Era of Supercomputing and AI

Workshop: International Workshop on RESource DISaggregation in High Performance Computing (RESDIS)

Authors: Fabrizio Petrini (Intel Corporation)

Abstract: As AI and HPC workloads push the limits of performance, power, and scalability, the industry faces a fundamental architectural shift. The traditional boundaries between compute, memory, and networking are dissolving, giving rise to disaggregated systems—composed from modular chiplets and accelerators that must communicate with near-monolithic efficiency. In this landscape, photonics is emerging not just as an I/O technology, but as the foundation for next-generation system architecture.
This keynote will explore how advances in integrated photonics—including silicon photonic interposers, co-packaged optics, and optical circuit fabrics—are transforming the design of large-scale AI and supercomputing platforms. By delivering orders-of-magnitude improvements in bandwidth density, latency uniformity, and energy per bit, photonics interconnects enable the flexible composition of heterogeneous compute elements across dies, packages, and system racks.
The talk will outline the evolution from electrical domain limits to photonic-domain scalability, highlighting how photonic fabrics can unify on-package, board-level, and cluster-scale communication. It will examine the interplay between photonics, packaging, and network topology, and discuss emerging opportunities in optically reconfigurable architectures for AI model training and HPC workflows. Ultimately, it will argue that photonics is not just a bandwidth solution—but the enabler of a new class of composable, memory-centric, and energy-efficient supercomputing systems.

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