Paper
28 January 2017 Toward exa-scale optical circuit switch interconnect networks for future datacenter/HPC
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Abstract
This paper discusses how to realize an optical circuit switching interconnect capable of more than 10 Tbps link bandwidth and more than 100,000 end points scalability. To keep continuous performance improvement of datacenters or high performance computers, high capacity and low latency interconnect network is essential. To handle such large bandwidth interconnect networks with low energy consumption, optical switch technologies will become inevitable. This paper firstly examines the scaling of the energy consumption of optical circuit switching networks based on the state of the art silicon photonics switch technology. Secondly to achieve Tbps-class link bandwidth, the WDM transmission technology and a shared WDM light source mechanism named “wavelength bank” are introduced. Due to the shared light source, each optical transceiver does not have to carry individual light sources, which enables simple WDM transceivers with cost-efficient silicon photonics technologies. Then a new optical switch control approach which reduces the control overhead time is discussed. In the proposed approach, the optical data plane itself represents the path destination, which enables a simple distributed-like control procedure. The proposed approach is expected to achieve the scalability and flexibility supporting more than 10 Tbps link bandwidth and more than 100,000 endpoints with 40 WDM channels. The proposed interconnect architecture offers direct end-to-end optical paths enabling low latencies with the “speed of light”. The paper also discusses some of the challenges which should be resolved to practically realize the future large bandwidth optical interconnect networks.
© (2017) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Kiyo Ishii, Takashi Inoue, and Shu Namiki "Toward exa-scale optical circuit switch interconnect networks for future datacenter/HPC", Proc. SPIE 10131, Next-Generation Optical Networks for Data Centers and Short-Reach Links IV, 1013105 (28 January 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2250796
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CITATIONS
Cited by 9 scholarly publications and 5 patents.
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KEYWORDS
Switches

Optical switching

Optical networks

Silicon photonics

Wavelength division multiplexing

Integrated optics

Optical amplifiers

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