Optical Switching

17Optical Switching for High‐Performance Computing

Rajendra Prasath, Bheemappa Halavar, and Odelu Vanga

Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Sri City, Chittoor, Andhra Pradesh, India

17.1 Introduction

Data centers are growing with the ever‐increasing quantity of data used across various applications and services in the world wide web (WWW). It has been observed that the size and the complexity of the data are also increasing with the ever‐increasing demand of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and services. In order to meet the growing need of the data centers, it has become essential to transfer a high volume of data across multiple servers (services/applications) very fast. Several applications in modern scenarios need to transfer a large amount of data, consuming a high bandwidth. This in turn pushes the service providers and data centers to provide sufficient bandwidth so as to provide users with faster access to various services/application programming interfaces. For many applications in recent days, it is important to ensure low network latency to achieve high throughput and scalability.

Optical networks are considered as a suitable paradigm to handle bandwidth and low latency issues in various data centers and service providers. The inherent “unlimited” nature of high‐capacity data transfers of optical fiber links allows transmission of data over hundreds of wavelength channels at very high data transfer rates. Additionally, optical switching ...