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A Petabit Bufferless Optical Switch for Data Center Networks

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Optical Interconnects for Future Data Center Networks

Part of the book series: Optical Networks ((OPNW))

Abstract

As critical infrastructures in the Internet, data centers have evolved to include hundreds of thousands of servers in a single facility to support data- and computing-intensive applications. For such large-scale systems, it becomes a great challenge to design an interconnection network that provides high capacity, low complexity, and low latency. The traditional approach is to build a hierarchical packet network using switches and routers. This approach has scalability problems in the aspects of wiring, control, and latency. We tackle the challenge by designing a novel switch architecture that supports direct interconnection of a huge number of server racks and provides Petabit switching capacity. Our design combines the best features of electronics and optics. Exploiting recent advances in optics, we propose to build a bufferless optical switch fabric that includes interconnected arrayed waveguide grating routers (AWGRs) and tunable wavelength converters (TWCs). The optical fabric is integrated with electronic buffering and control to perform high-speed switching with nanosecond-level reconfiguration overhead. In particular, our architecture reduces the wiring complexity from O(N) to O(sqrt(N)). We design a practical and scalable scheduling algorithm to achieve high throughput under various traffic load. We also discuss implementation issues to justify the feasibility of this design. Simulation results show that our design achieves good throughput and delay performance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Brooklyn, New York, 11201, USA

    Kang Xi, Yu-Hsiang Kao & H. Jonathan Chao

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  1. Kang Xi
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  2. Yu-Hsiang Kao
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  3. H. Jonathan Chao
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Correspondence to Kang Xi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Networks and Optical Communications Lab, Athens Information Technology, Peania, Greece

    Christoforos Kachris

  2. , Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, 10027, USA

    Keren Bergman

  3. , Networks and Optical Communications Lab, Athens Information Technology, Peania, Greece

    Ioannis Tomkos

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Xi, K., Kao, YH., Chao, H.J. (2013). A Petabit Bufferless Optical Switch for Data Center Networks. In: Kachris, C., Bergman, K., Tomkos, I. (eds) Optical Interconnects for Future Data Center Networks. Optical Networks. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4630-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4630-9_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-4629-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-4630-9

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