{"id":671583,"date":"2020-07-03T18:39:19","date_gmt":"2020-07-04T01:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newed.any0.dpdns.org\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=671583"},"modified":"2025-08-11T03:33:30","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T10:33:30","slug":"sirius-a-flat-datacenter-network-with-nanosecond-optical-switching","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/newed.any0.dpdns.org\/en-us\/research\/publication\/sirius-a-flat-datacenter-network-with-nanosecond-optical-switching\/","title":{"rendered":"Sirius: A Flat Datacenter Network with Nanosecond Optical Switching"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The increasing gap between the growth of datacenter traffic and electrical switch capacity is expected to worsen due to the slowdown of Moore&#8217;s law, motivating the need for a new switching technology for the post-Moore&#8217;s law era that can meet the increasingly stringent requirements of hardware-driven cloud workloads. We propose Sirius, an optically-switched network for datacenters providing the abstraction of a single, high-radix switch that can connect thousands of nodes&#8212;racks or servers&#8212;in a datacenter while achieving nanosecond-granularity reconfiguration. At its core, Sirius uses a combination of tunable lasers and simple, passive gratings that route light based on its wavelength. Sirius&#8217; switching technology and topology is tightly codesigned with its routing and scheduling and with novel congestion-control and time-synchronization mechanisms to achieve a scalable yet flat network that can offer high bandwidth and very low end-to-end latency. Through a small-scale prototype using a custom tunable laser chip that can tune in less than 912 ps, we demonstrate 3.84 ns end-to-end reconfiguration atop 50 Gbps channels. Through large-scale simulations, we show that Sirius can approximate the performance of an ideal, electrically-switched non-blocking network with up to 74-77% lower power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The increasing gap between the growth of datacenter traffic and electrical switch capacity is expected to worsen due to the slowdown of Moore&#8217;s law, motivating the need for a new switching technology for the post-Moore&#8217;s law era that can meet the increasingly stringent requirements of hardware-driven cloud workloads. We propose Sirius, an optically-switched network for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"ACM","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"The ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Data Communication 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