Passive optical interconnects at top of the rack: offering high energy efficiency for datacenters.

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces a new concept, namely passive optical interconnect at top of the rack in the datacenter networks, and investigates several architectures, which use only passive optical components to interconnect different servers. In such a manner, the proposed schemes are able to offer higher bandwidth and significantly improve energy efficiency compared to their electronic counterpart that is based on commodity switches. The proposed passive optical interconnect schemes are experimentally demonstrated in order to validate the transmission performance. Besides, an assessment in terms of energy consumption and cost has also been carried out, which shows our proposed concept can significantly outperform the conventional commodity switches on energy efficiency while keeping the cost in the similar level.