High port low latency optical switch architecture with optical feed forward buffering for 256 node disaggregated data centers.
Departing from traditional server centric data center architectures towards disaggregated systems that can offer increased resource utilization at reduced cost and energy envelopes, the use of high port switching with highly stringent latency and bandwidth requirements becomes a necessity. We present an optical switch architecture exploiting a hybrid broadcast and select/wavelength routing scheme with small scale optical feedforward buffering. The architecture is experimentally demonstrated at 10Gb/s, reporting error free performance with a power penalty of <2.5dB. Moreover, network simulations for a 256 node system, revealed low latency values of only 605nsec, at throughput values reaching 80% when employing 2 packet size optical buffers, while multi rack network performance was also investigated.
Optics express