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.'"

Comments

Not to be confused with...

[Embedded Geek]

CL-ITIT is not related to the California Institue of Technology - or at least not directly. Per their vision statement, they were created in 2000 at UC San Diego and UC Irvine to "help ensure that California maintain(s) its leadership in the rapidly changing telecommunications and information technology marketplace."

Also, their statement on the Chiaro Networks "OptIPuter" is here. Caltech is an entirely different animal.

Hooray

[Adam9]

Yay for free subscriptions.. here are some other sources for similar reportings that don't require evil subscriptions.

Optical routing

[ctar]

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.

Chiaro is no stranger to super-computing

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:*Yawn*

[Alien Being]

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.

Not quite an optical router

[Animats]

This is an optical switch fabric, but it's still a few steps short of a router. Something else has to make the routing decisions and set the switches. It does the same job as the MEMS-type optical switch fabrics (the moving-mirror patchboards), but will switch in nanoseconds.

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.