Benjamin, Joshua L; (2020) Towards Sub-microsecond Optical Circuit Switched Networks for Future Data Centers. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Preview

Text PhD_Thesis_J_Benjamin_v2 (1).pdf - Accepted Version Download (9MB) | Preview

Abstract

The combination of ever-growing data demand and the slowing down of Moore’s law are creating substantial pressure to today’s Data Center Networks, forcing them to scale. On one note, traditional scaling methods of increasing electronic packet switches (EPS) in the network have a significant impact on energy consumption and costs. On another, computing application performance suffers from long tail latencies when a network employs packet switching technology. Moreover, a holistic migration to optically switched networks further increases control plane complexity when duly replicating all functionalities available in current EPSs. Hence, I propose PULSE, a broadcast-and-select optically circuit switched network, that has the potential to transform data center networks by reducing circuit establishment time to sub-microseconds, whilst consequently reducing latency, energy consumption and cost. We show how the development and re-arrangement of this all parallel disjointed optical data plane architecture can provide flexibility, modularity and scalability. The primary focus and novelty of this work is the development of the control hardware scheduler that enables OCS timeslot and wavelength computation in nanosecond speeds. Each rack contains a PULSE Network scheduler Processing Unit (NsPU), which is highly parallel and pipelined multi-core processor that functions at a 435 MHz clock speed for a 64-server rack when synthesized on 45nm CMOS library. The scheduler exploits parallelism and pipelining to compute the best possible resource matching configuration to an NP-hard problem within tens to hundreds of. My simulations show how PULSE’s SDM/WDM/TDM based network can be configured to achieve above 90% sustained throughput, tolerant to scaling N-server racks and diverse traffic distributions, achieving median latency of 120ns and tail latency of 6.6ms. PULSE is a synchronized network that uses fast wavelength selection transceivers based on widely tunable DS-DBR lasers, coherent receivers and SOAs to achieve fast tuning capabilities that consume only 100-200 pJ/bit.

Download activity - last month

Export as JSONCSVXML

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item