Dynamically reconfigurable hybrid optical / electrical networks for high-bandwidth data centers

Bandwidth intensive applications including scientific computing and real-time video processing are expected to strain data center networking infrastructure. Traditional solutions to increase capacity (high performance electrical components, dense WDM, high speed optical switching, over provisioning) are currently too costly. We are exploring a data center with a hybrid optical/electrical networking architecture that provides slowly reconfigurable high bandwidth connections [1,2,3]. We believe that such an architecture is widely applicable to emerging applications which often have relatively static communication patterns that change on human rather than packet time-scales. This architecture consists of traditional electronic components plus a relatively smaller number of higher bandwidth optical components (Figure 1). A new software layer between the application and the hardware will reconfigure the network automatically based on communication requirements provided by the application and the reconfigurable hardware components.