Sirius: A Flat Datacenter Network with Nanosecond Optical Switching

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Hitesh Ballani, MSR
• Thursday 20 August 2020, 15:00-16:00
• https://meet.google.com/ehj-dwaz-rea.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Srinivasan Keshav.

The increasing gap between the growth of datacenter traffic and electrical switch capacity is expected to worsen due to the slowdown of Moore’s law, motivating the need for a new switching technology for the post-Moore’s law era. We have been developing Sirius, an optically-switched network for datacenters providing the abstraction of a single, high-radix switch that can connect thousands of nodes—racks or servers—in a datacenter while achieving nanosecond-granularity reconfiguration. At its core, Sirius uses a combination of tunable lasers and simple, passive gratings that route light based on its wavelength. In this talk, I will describe how Sirius’ switching technology and topology is tightly codesigned with its routing and scheduling and with novel congestion-control and time-synchronization mechanisms to achieve a scalable yet flat network that can offer high bandwidth and very low end-to-end latency. Our small-scale Sirius prototype, using a custom tunable laser chip that can tune in less than a nanosecond, demonstrates end-to-end optical switching in 3.84ns.

Bio: Hitesh Ballani is a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. His research aims to build systems and networks for next-generation data centers. His current focus is on developing optical technologies for the cloud. Previously, he worked on a Quality-of-Service architecture for networked storage that ships in Windows Server. He graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2009 and then joined Microsoft.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CL's SRG seminar
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar
• Department of Computer Science and Technology talks and seminars
• Interested Talks
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• https://meet.google.com/ehj-dwaz-rea
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.