Special Symposium on Optical Networks and Devices for Data Centers

There currently exists significant world-wide interest in designing and deploying large data centers; such data centers will have Exaflop/s processing capabilities. With computer systems performance approaching the Exaflop/s level, a dramatic increase in communications bandwidth for moving ExaBytes/s of data across the system, between the racks, chips and cores is becoming a major challenge. The interconnection capacity requirements for such large systems are enormous and will exceed what is possible from using electronic approaches. In parallel, there is discussion about the architecture of such data centers. Given that these systems will incorporate thousands of processors, there are many architectural questions that remain unanswered. The symposium will explore how recent advances in data center system design and enabling optical interconnection technologies (e.g. nanoscale silicon photonic technologies) will, in concert, address the critical bandwidth and power challenges presented across several levels of the computing system interconnect.