Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: As traditional semiconductor scaling slows, highspeed interconnects have emerged as the new scaling engine, enabling the creation of larger logical GPUs by linking many GPUs into a single, low-latency, high-bandwidth compute domain. While initial scale-up fabrics leveraged copper interconnects for their power and cost advantages, the maximum reach of passive electrical interconnects (approximately 1 meter) effectively limits the scale-up domain to within a single rack. The advent of 3Dstacked optics and logic offers a transformative, power-efficient scale-up solution for connecting hundreds of GPU packages (thousands of GPUs) across multiple data center racks.This work explores the design tradeoffs of scale-up technologies and demonstrates how frontier LLMs necessitate novel photonic solutions to achieve aggressive power and performance targets. We model the benefits of 3D integrated optics (Passage) enabled GPUs and switches within the scale-up domain when training Frontier Mixture of Experts (MoE) models exceeding one trillion parameters. Our results show a 2.7X reduction in time-to-train, unlocking unprecedented model scaling.
Source: IEEE Micro
Institution: Lightmatter (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4415947799