Special session on challenges and opportunities of integrated photonics in future datacenters

Program

2015/1/27(Tue.)

09:15∼10:45

• (Chair: Shu Namiki (AIST))
  • Expectations for optical network from the viewpoint of system software research
    Ryousei Takano (AIST)
    abstract
    
  • Optical fiber network system for next generation data center
    Haruhiko Kuwatsuka (AIST)
    abstract
    
  • Photonic and Electronic Convergence Technologies for 1-chip Data Center
    Jun Inasaka (NEC/PETRA)
    abstract

Abstracts

• (9:15 - 9:45) Expectations for optical network from the viewpoint of system software research
  Ryousei Takano, AIST
  Abstract:
  Recently, some innovative data center architectures have been proposed from both academia and industry, for instance, Open Compute Project, UCB ASPIRE FireBox, Intel Rack scale architecture, and HP the machine. "Disaggregation" is a keyword of such architectures. Computers are divided into their component parts and a rack-scale or data center-scale computer is re-aggregated from the resource pool to meet users' requirements. Optical network is a promising technology to connect components with huge bandwidth and low power consumption. To utilize such advantages from applications, there are research opportunities for system software. This talk presents expectations or optical network in future data center and HPC from the viewpoint of system software research through the survey of such a trend.
  
  
• (9:45-10:15) Optical fiber network system for next generation data center
  Haruhiko Kuwatsuka, AIST
  Abstract:
  New optical fiber network systems will provide ultra wide band, flexible, and low power-consumption inter connections between computing nodes in data centers of big data era. A lot of advanced technologies developed for optical communication systems, such as optical coherent technology, DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) technology, light source technologies including comb light sources, ROADM (Re-configurable Optical Add Drop Multiplexing) and various optical switching technologies, will be used in combination for the new optical fiber network systems of the data centers. OXC (Optical CROSS connect) switches developed in VICTOREIS (Vertically Integrated Center for Technologies of Optical Routing toward Ideal Energy Savings) will be useful for the optical network systems. A new concept of wavelength bank and distributing systems will be discussed, in which DWDM CW's (Continuous Waves) generated from a central-controlled comb light sources, which is called wavelength bank, are distributed to each computing node and each computing node selects some of CW's and generates signal waves by them. The signal waves from each node are sent to a target node by OXC switching systems. The development of low cost, low power-consumption and highly integrated optical devices by using new technologies such as Si photonics is indispensable for the systems.
  
  
• (9:45-10:15) Photonic and Electronic Convergence Technologies for 1-chip Data Center
  Jun Inasaka, NEC/PETRA
  Abstract:
  High-end Servers and High-performance Computers are facing the three huge walls such as memory wall, power wall and high speed electrical transmission wall. These walls have slowed down the sustained performance and the power efficient especially in the large scale system. But these walls might be broken by integrating photonics and Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to the LSI, server board and rack in the near future. We have developed 5 mm square Si-photonics-based chip-scale optical transmitters/receivers called "optical I/O cores". The power consumption of their hybrid-integrated ICs is 5 mW/Gbps. We demonstrated 25-Gbps/ch error-free operation in the O band. There is great demand for optical interconnections in high-performance computers because they can cover the long transmission distances that electrical interconnections cannot as the data rate increases. We will integrate this optical IO cores to CPU module as a high speed optical interface beside CPU, in order to solve the I/O bottleneck. And we also have developed TSV process to integrate into Si-photonics chip for Silicon Optical Interposers and the high-performance 1-chip Data Center.