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© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

In this paper we review key technological milestones in system embedded optical interconnects in data centers that have been achieved between 2014 and 2020 on major European Union research and development projects. This includes the development of proprietary optically enabled data storage and switch systems and optically enabled data storage and compute subsystems. We report on four optically enabled data center system demonstrators: LightningValley, ThunderValley2, Pegasus and Aurora, which include advanced optical circuits based on polymer waveguides and fibers and proprietary electro-optical connectors. We also report on optically enabled subsystems including Ethernet-connected hard disk drives and microservers. Both are designed in the same pluggable carrier form factor and with embedded optical transceiver and connector interfaces, thus allowing, for the first time, both compute and storage nodes to be optically interchangeable and directly interconnectable over long distances. Finally, we present the Nexus platform, which allows different optically enabled data center test systems and subsystems to be interconnected and comparatively characterized within a data center test environment.

Details

Title
Evolution of System Embedded Optical Interconnect in Sub-Top-of-Rack Data Center Systems
Author
Pitwon, Richard 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Reddy, Anil 2 ; Jain, Aditya 2 ; Gomez, Kevin 2 ; Schulz, Sebastian A 3   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Liam O’Faolain 4   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Wang, Kai 5 ; Miller, Allen 6 ; Davies, Vivienne 6 

 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, UK; [email protected] (S.A.S.); [email protected] (L.O.); Seagate Research Group, Seagate Technology, Shakopee, MN 55379, USA; [email protected] (A.R.); [email protected] (A.J.); [email protected] (K.G.); Resolute Photonics Ltd., Eastleigh SO53 3AL, UK 
 Seagate Research Group, Seagate Technology, Shakopee, MN 55379, USA; [email protected] (A.R.); [email protected] (A.J.); [email protected] (K.G.) 
 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, UK; [email protected] (S.A.S.); [email protected] (L.O.) 
 School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, UK; [email protected] (S.A.S.); [email protected] (L.O.); Centre for Advanced Photonics and Process Analysis (CAPPA), Munster Technology University, T12 P928 Cork, Ireland 
 WaveOptics Ltd., Abingdon OX14 4SR, UK; [email protected] 
 Seagate Systems UK Ltd., Havant PO9 1SA, UK; [email protected] 
First page
1565
Publication year
2022
Publication date
2022
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20763417
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2636122218
Copyright
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.