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Introduction to Cloud Connect: Using light to create better datacenter networks

New applications such as real-time video processing are expected to strain data center networking infrastructure. These applications require amounts of bandwidth that are prohibitively expensive to provide using today's data center architectures. Traditional solutions to increase capacity are costly for data centers that rely on low-cost commodity hardware. The Cloud Connect research project investigates the performance improvements possible to datacenter applications when using a hybrid architecture that augments the traditional electrical switch tree hierarchy with an optical network. Optical networks have enormous potential for high bandwidth; however, commercial implementation of optical links, especially for data centers has been hampered by relatively high cost and high power consumption. We aim for an end to end view that will enable a viable solution. At every level, network, switch, and link layer we explore the electrical / optical interface to exploit appropriate electrical and optical advantages.

Publications

  • c-Through: Part-time Optics in Data Centers. Guohui Wang, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Konstantina Papagiannaki, T. S. Eugene Ng, Michael Kozuch, Michael Ryan. To appear in ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Computer Communications (SIGCOMM 2010), New Delhi, India, August/September 2010.
  • Design Studies for an ASIC Implementation of an Optical OFDM Transceiver, Rachid Bouziane, Peter A. Milder, Robert Koutsoyannis, Yannis Benlachtar, Christian Berger, James C. Hoe, Markus Pueschel, Madeleine Glick and Robert I. Killey, to appear in Proc. European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC), 2010.
  • Design and Demonstration of an All-Optical Hybrid Packet and Circuit Switched Network Platform for Next Generation Data Centers, H. Wang, A. S. Garg, K. Bergman, M. Glick, Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2010 OTuP3 (Mar 2010).
  • Generation of optical OFDM signals using 21.4 GS/s real time digital signal processing, Yannis Benlachtar, Philip M. Watts, Rachid Bouziane, Peter Milder, Deepak Rangaraj, Anthony Cartolano, Robert Koutsoyannis, James C. Hoe, Markus Pueschel, Madeleine Glick, and Robert I. Killey in Optics Express, Vol. 17, Issue 20, pp. 17658-17668
    http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-17-20-17658
  • Your Data Center Is a Router: The Case for Reconfigurable Optical Circuit Switched Paths, Guohui Wang, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Michael Kozuch, T. S. Eugene Ng, Konstantina Papagiannaki, Madeleine Glick, Lily Mummert, in Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-VIII) October 22-23, 2009 New York City, NY
    http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2009/program.html
  • 21.4 GS/s Real-Time DSP-Based Optical OFDM Signal Generation and Transmission Over 1600 km of Uncompensated Fibre, Yannis Benlachtar, Philip M. Watts, Rachid Bouziane, Peter Milder, Robert Koutsoyannis, James C.Hoe, Markus Pueschel, Madeleine Glick and Robert I. Killey, in to the European Conference on Optical Communications 2009, Post Deadline Paper Session.
  • Dynamically Reconfigurable Optical Links for High-Bandwidth Data Center Networks, Madeleine Glick, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, and Lily Mummert, in Optical Fiber Communication Conference, OSA Technical Digest (CD) (Optical Society of America, 2009), paper OTuA3. Invited paper.
    http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=OFC-2009-OTuA3 or http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5032750&isnumber=5032267

Researchers

Madeleine Glick (PI)
Dina Papagiannaki
Michael Kaminsky
Michael Kozuch
Lily Mummert

Collaborators

Markus Pueschel (Carnegie Mellon ECE)
James C. Hoe (Carnegie Mellon ECE)
David Andersen (Carnegie Mellon CS)
Christian Berger (Carnegie Mellon ECE)
Robert Killey (University College London)
Yannis Benlachter (University College London)
Philip M. Watts (University College London)
Keren Bergman (Columbia University)
T. S. Eugene Ng (Rice University)

Students

Robert Koutsoyannis (Carnegie Mellon University)
Peter Milder (Carnegie Mellon University)
Rachid Bouziane (University College London)
Guohui Wang (Rice University)
Howard Wang (Columbia University)
Ajay S. Garg (Columbia University)

Previous Collaborators

Michael Ryan (now at Google)
Deepak Rangaraj (now at Intel)
Anthony Cartolano