Evolution of system embedded optical interconnect in sub-top of rack data center systems
Abstract
In this paper we review key technological milestones in system embedded optical interconnects in data centers that have been achieved between 2014 and 2020 on major European Union research and development projects. This includes the development of proprietary optically enabled data storage and switch systems and optically enabled data storage and compute subsystems. We report on four optically enabled data center system demonstrators: LightningValley, ThunderValley2, Pegasus and Aurora, which include advanced optical circuits based on polymer waveguides and fibers and proprietary electro-optical connectors. We also report on optically enabled subsystems including Ethernet-connected hard disk drives and microservers. Both are designed in the same pluggable carrier form factor and with embedded optical transceiver and connector interfaces, thus allowing, for the first time, both compute and storage nodes to be optically interchangeable and directly interconnectable over long distances. Finally, we present the Nexus platform, which allows different optically enabled data center test systems and subsystems to be interconnected and comparatively characterized within a data center test environment.
Citation
Pitwon , R C A , Reddy , A , Jain , A , Gomez , K , Schulz , S A , O'Faolain , L , Wang , K , Miller , A & Davies , V 2022 , ' Evolution of system embedded optical interconnect in sub-top of rack data center systems ' , Applied Sciences , vol. 12 , no. 3 , 1565 . https://doi.org/10.3390/app12031565
Publication
Applied Sciences
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2076-3417Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Description
This research was funded by the EU FP7 project “PhoxTrot”, for which it has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 318240, the Horizon2020 Nephele project (Grant No. 645212), the Horizon2020 COSMICC project (Grant No. 688516).Collections
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