NeTS: Small: Can Disaggregation and Silicon Optical Interconnect Technology Co-exist?

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

About one hundred billion data packets (equivalent to a few thousand Encyclopedia Brittanicas) are transmitted every second from a typical office building. Bottlenecks or breakdowns in modern communication networks instantly impact air travel, healthcare, financial markets, education and entertainment, and national security - in short, every aspect of modern life. To increase bandwidth for the coming decade without commensurately increasing energy consumption, engineers are now using photons (light) rather than electrons (voltage) to carry data between computers. In the near future, photonics may also be used to communicate between microchips inside computers, or between microprocessors and memory. This project addresses a emerging research challenge in ensuring the scalability, control and effective management of massive optically-connected networks such as warehouse-sized data centers. Disaggregation replaces motherboard bus architecures with communication networks such as Infiniband and PCIe, thus enabling scalability and controllability, but requires the network to deal with new types of data flows that span several orders of magnitude in bandwidth and latency requirements. These requirements are not compatible with the type of silicon photonic chips that have been designed so far. This project will use silicon photonics to more effectively enable disaggregation within data centers; leveraging key strengths of optical communications compared to traditional electronic wires: the ability of light of different colors to pass through each other without interference, thus enabling different logical interconnections in a network across the same physical network topology. To test and develop this concept, silicon photonic microchips will be designed and fabricated in collaboration with industry and/or government organizations that host silicon photonic foundry resources. The performance of these innovative communication chipsets will be studied in a optical networking testbed.