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Supercomputer To Use Optical Router
Izmunuti writes "From a NYTimes article: 'Highlighting a radical departure in the design of the fastest computers, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology plans to announce on Monday that it will use an optical router
designed by a Texas company as the heart of a
campus-wide supercomputer that will be woven together with optical fibers.'"
Someone figured out that you can pack more bandwidth and less latency into fiberoptics than copper?
More importantly they are actualy using an optical router to prevent what has become a botleneck in resent years. I.e. Data comming off a fiber pipe is converted to electrical signals before being routed to it's next destination where it's converted back to little bity laser beams.
This should be faster than your typical loadsharing super computer (SETI@home) but slower than the miranet using hardcore. With enogh nodes however there is no telling howfast this baby can get.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Also, their statement on the Chiaro Networks "OptIPuter" is here. Caltech is an entirely different animal.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Yay for free subscriptions.. here are some other sources for similar reportings that don't require evil subscriptions.
The idea of optical routing is that, even in typical gigabit or any optical based networking media, the bottleneck is the processors in the routers. This is because the light must be converted to electrical signals, and then routing decisions and switching are done on the processor of the router. After being processed, the signals are converted back to optical to be sent out the appropriate port.
Optical switching means that the light coming in on fiber from different devices is never converted to electrical to be routed. The actual light signals are switched from port to port. This was originally planned to be done with very small mirrors! (no joke!) which would aim incoming light to the corresponding outgoing port.
According to the whitepaper on Chiaro's website, they have found a way to avoid the mirrors (which have an obvious bottleneck themselves, as well as potential mechanical failure) and they are able to multiplex or switch the light based on applying an electrical field to some of the optical components which them changes the angle and therefore the destination of the light.
Most of the key people at Chiaro are people who jumped ship from Convex Computer after they were acquired by Hewlett-Packard back in the mid-90s. Convex's claim to fame was to have invented and productized the first mini-supercomputer hitting the sweet-spot between the biggest vax and the smallest cray and they were very successful for about a decade.
Larry Smarr, of UIUC's supercomputing center (aka the place where Mosaic was developed) has always been a big fan of the Convex crowd.
Another bit of trivia - Jeff Christenson, of PERL fame is a convex alum as well as Dave Taylor of Id Software fame and a whole host of other key people now scattered about the world.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The innovation has nothing to do with the external connections.
The interesting thing about this switch is that, internally, it routes photons instead of electrons.
Once it sets up a connection, e.g. port-5 to port 17, the photons can "just go". In other words, there are no capacitors(wires) and gates(transistors) to slow things down.
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The experiment you reference does NOT show information travelling faster than light.. as is explained in the article.
The waveform appears to exit the apparatus before it enters, but this is not so under scrutiny... as the article says, the beginning of the wave enters the glass (long before the peak) and there is enough information there to re-create the original wave.
There are several phenomenon that appear at first to be superluminal, but they do not violate relativity, and are not actually moving anything faster than light, nor are they transmitting information.
"...optical switches is that the switching time is on the order of tens of *milliseconds*..."
Apparently, this company's optical switch doesn't take tens of milliseconds. They claim it can switch in tens of nanoseconds. They call it an "optical phased array" -- no moving parts. They talk about it a bit on their web site.
The pure optical IP or ATM router is still years away. Optical computing isn't up to optical packet decode and route lookup. Optical buffering isn't ready, either, although you could potentially store packets temporarily in a fibre delay line.