BLAZELAN: A Photonic Local-Area Network For Distributed And Parallel Processing.

This memorandum discusses the need for very high speed local- area networks (with delays of the order of tens to hundreds of microseconds) for communication in a high-performance distributed systems environment, and proposes a network design, Blazelan, that lends itself to photonic implementation. Blazelan, by providing packet storage in the fiber medium, as well as explicit data-link and network flow control by the physical layer, demonstrates how functionality can be traded for bandwidth. Blazelan can revolutionize local-area networking by providing very high- capacity and low-delay communication for closely coupled machines, which can serve as a basis for realization of a true distributed processing system. The network described here is a local-area network; however, the Blazelan approach can be easily extended to larger networks.