ORION has the following objectives:

1. Design and evaluate the performance of an energy-efficient 1kByte 40GHz optical cache demonstrating <10fJ/bit energy consumption,
2. Demonstrate the first optical cache hardware prototype
3. Build a disintegrated high-throughput computing architecture based on reconfigurable and unified L1 optical cache.

ORION will ensure harmonic co-operation between a pool of high-throughput off-chip optical L1 caches, a “cache-light” processor and DRAM modules, interconnected through a strictly non-blocking, collision-less, off-chip photonic Network on chip (pNoC) transforming multicore computing systems into a reconfigurable modular infrastructure that can be tailored to the application needs.