Toward exa-scale optical circuit switch interconnect networks for future datacenter/HPC

This paper discusses how to realize an optical circuit switching interconnect capable of more than 10 Tbps link bandwidth and more than 100,000 end points scalability. To keep continuous performance improvement of datacenters or high performance computers, high capacity and low latency interconnect network is essential. To handle such large bandwidth interconnect networks with low energy consumption, optical switch technologies will become inevitable. This paper firstly examines the scaling of the energy consumption of optical circuit switching networks based on the state of the art silicon photonics switch technology. Secondly to achieve Tbps-class link bandwidth, the WDM transmission technology and a shared WDM light source mechanism named “wavelength bank” are introduced. Due to the shared light source, each optical transceiver does not have to carry individual light sources, which enables simple WDM transceivers with cost-efficient silicon photonics technologies. Then a new optical switch control approach which reduces the control overhead time is discussed. In the proposed approach, the optical data plane itself represents the path destination, which enables a simple distributed-like control procedure. The proposed approach is expected to achieve the scalability and flexibility supporting more than 10 Tbps link bandwidth and more than 100,000 endpoints with 40 WDM channels. The proposed interconnect architecture offers direct end-to-end optical paths enabling low latencies with the “speed of light”. The paper also discusses some of the challenges which should be resolved to practically realize the future large bandwidth optical interconnect networks.