The growing popularity of cloud and multimedia services is increasing the traffic volume that each datacenter (DC) needs to process. As a consequence, serious bottlenecks in DC networks in terms of both capacity and energy consumption need to be addressed. DC networks typically consist of edge tier, aggregation tier and core tier, which interconnect different servers within a DC as well as provide the interfaces to the Internet. Current large-scale DC network architectures are based on the fat-tree three-tiers topology and on electronic switches, which are not able to scale to meet future traffic requirements in a sustainable manner. Reducing the power required by the inter- and intra-rack communication inside DCs through use of optical technology opens a way to solve this problem. However, the current optical switching technologies are not able to support the dynamic DC traffic, and hence, new optical interconnect architectures are needed. This talk will focus on the recent progress of optical interconnects and present research activities on optical DC networks.

Speaker(s): Jiajia Chen,

Location:
Room: MD267
Bldg: Macdonald Engineering Building
817 Sherbrooke West
Montreal, Quebec
H3A0C3