High-port low-latency optical switch architecture with optical feed-forward buffering for 256-node disaggregated data...

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Electrical Engineering
• Optical Networking

Background:

• Traditional server-centric data centers face limitations in resource utilization, cost, and energy consumption.
• Disaggregated systems require advanced networking solutions to meet stringent latency and bandwidth demands.
• High-port count optical switching is crucial for efficient data center interconnects.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel optical switch architecture for disaggregated data centers.
• To address the need for high-port density, low-latency, and high-bandwidth switching solutions.
• To experimentally validate the proposed architecture and evaluate its performance through simulations.

Main Methods:

• Development of a hybrid broadcast-and-select/wavelength routing optical switch.
• Integration of small-scale optical feedforward buffering.
• Experimental demonstration at 10Gb/s with power penalty measurements.
• Network simulations of a 256-node system with varying buffer sizes.

Main Results:

• Experimental error-free performance achieved with a power penalty of less than 2.5dB at 10Gb/s.
• Network simulations demonstrated low latency of 605nsec for a 256-node system.
• High throughput reaching 80% was observed with 2-packet-size optical buffers.
• Performance analysis extended to multi-rack network configurations.

Conclusions:

• The proposed hybrid optical switch architecture is a viable solution for disaggregated data centers.
• The architecture meets the stringent latency and bandwidth requirements for future high-performance networks.
• Experimental validation and simulations confirm the efficiency and scalability of the design.