Free space intra-datacenter interconnects based on 2D optical beam steering enabled by photonic integrated circuits

Data centers are continuously growing in scale and can contain more than one million servers spreading across thousands of racks; requiring a large-scale switching network to provide broadband and reconfigurable interconnections of low latency. Traditional data center network architectures, through the use of electrical packet switches in a multi-tier topology, has fundamental weaknesses such as oversubscription and cabling complexity. Wireless intra-data center interconnection solutions have been proposed to deal with the cabling problem and can simultaneously address the over-provisioning problem by offering efficient topology re-configurability. In this work we introduce a novel free space optical interconnect solution for intra-data center networks that utilizes 2D optical beam steering for the transmitter, and high bandwidth wide-area photodiode arrays for the receiver. This new breed of free space optical interconnects can be developed on a photonic integrated circuit; offering ns switching at sub-µW consumption. The proposed interconnects together with a networking architecture that is suitable for utilizing those devices could support next generation intra-data center networks, fulfilling the requirements of seamless operation, high connectivity, and agility in terms of the reconfiguration time.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Software-controlled next generation optical circuit switching for HPC and cloud computing datacenters

In this paper, we consider the performance of optical circuit switching (OCS) systems designed for data center networks by using network-level simulation. Recent proposals have used OCS in data center networks but the relatively slow switching times of OCS-MEMS switches (10–100 ms) and the latencies of control planes in these approaches have limited their use to the largest data center networks with workloads that last several seconds. Herein, we extend the applicability and generality of these studies by considering dynamically changing short-lived circuits in software-controlled OCS switches, using the faster switching technologies that are now available. The modelled switch architecture features fast optical switches in a single hop topology with a centralized, software-defined optical control plane. We model different workloads with various traffic aggregation parameters to investigate the performance of such designs across usage patterns. Our results show that, with suitable choices for the OCS system parameters, delay performance comparable to that of electrical data center networks can be obtained

HFOS _L:hyper scale fast optical switch-based data center network with L-level sub-network

The ever-expanding growth of internet traffic enforces deployment of massive Data Center Networks (DCNs) supporting high performance communications. Optical switching is being studied as a promising approach to fulfill the surging requirements of large scale data centers. The tree-based optical topology limits the scalability of the interconnected network due to the limitations in the port count of optical switches and the lack of optical buffers. Alternatively, buffer-less Fast Optical Switch (FOS) was proposed to realize the nanosecond switching of optical DCNs. Although FOSs provide nanosecond optical switching, they still suffer from port count limitations to scale the DCN. To address the issue of scaling DCNs to more than two million servers, we propose the hyper scale FOS-based L-level DCNs (HFOSL) which is capable of building large networks with small radix switches. The numerical analysis shows L of 4 is the optimal level for HFOSL to obtain the lowest cost and power consumption. Specifically, under a network size of 160,000 servers, HFOS4 saves 36.2% in cost compared with the 2-level FOS-based DCN, while achieves 60% improvement for cost and 26.7% improvement for power consumption compared with Fat tree. Moreover, a wide range of simulations and analyses demonstrate that HFOS4 outperforms state-of-art FOS-based DCNs by up to 40% end-to-end latency under DCN size of 81920 servers.</p

HFOS _L:hyper scale fast optical switch-based data center network with L-level sub-network

The ever-expanding growth of internet traffic enforces deployment of massive Data Center Networks (DCNs) supporting high performance communications. Optical switching is being studied as a promising approach to fulfill the surging requirements of large scale data centers. The tree-based optical topology limits the scalability of the interconnected network due to the limitations in the port count of optical switches and the lack of optical buffers. Alternatively, buffer-less Fast Optical Switch (FOS) was proposed to realize the nanosecond switching of optical DCNs. Although FOSs provide nanosecond optical switching, they still suffer from port count limitations to scale the DCN. To address the issue of scaling DCNs to more than two million servers, we propose the hyper scale FOS-based L-level DCNs (HFOSL) which is capable of building large networks with small radix switches. The numerical analysis shows L of 4 is the optimal level for HFOSL to obtain the lowest cost and power consumption. Specifically, under a network size of 160,000 servers, HFOS4 saves 36.2% in cost compared with the 2-level FOS-based DCN, while achieves 60% improvement for cost and 26.7% improvement for power consumption compared with Fat tree. Moreover, a wide range of simulations and analyses demonstrate that HFOS4 outperforms state-of-art FOS-based DCNs by up to 40% end-to-end latency under DCN size of 81920 servers.</p