EPFL and Microsoft Research scientists demonstrated ultrafast optical circuit switching using a chip-based soliton comb laser and a completely passive diffraction grating device. This particular architecture could enable an energy-efficient optical datacenter to meet enormous data bandwidth requirements in future.
Services from all hyper-scale cloud providers like Microsoft are powered by massive datacenters that employ hundreds of thousands of servers, whose performance depends heavily on the quality of the network between them. Current datacenter networks include multiple layers of electrical packet switches interconnected through optical fibers. These systems require electrical-to-optical conversion, which increases cost and power overhead. To make things worse, growing data rates due to applications like AI and data analytics could concur with the slowdown of Moore’s law which would make it extremely difficult to efficiently scale current network architectures relying on electrical chips.
Source: “Ultrafast optical switching can save overwhelmed datacenters”, EPFL News
