OFC 2024 industry reflections

Gazettabyte is asking industry figures for their thoughts after attending the recent OFC show in San Diego. In particular, what developments and trends they noted, what they learned and what, if anything, surprised them. Here are the first responses from Huawei, Drut Technologies and Aloe Semiconductor.

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director R&D, Optical & Quantum Communication Laboratory at Huawei.

Some ten years ago datacom took the helm of the optical transceiver market from legacy telecom operators to command a much larger volume of short-reach optics and extend its vision into dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM).

At OFC, the industry witnessed another passing-of-the-torch moment as Nvidia took over the dominant position in the optics market where AI compute is driving optical communication. The old guard of Google is now following while others are closely watching.

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Drut tackles disaggregation at a data centre scale

• Drut’s DynamicXcelerator supports up to 4,096 accelerators using optical switching and co-packaged optics. Four such clusters enable the scaling to reach 16,384 accelerators.
• The system costs less and is cheaper to run, has lower latency, and better uses the processors and memory.
• The system is an open design supporting CPUs and GPUs from different vendors. 
• DynamicXcelerator will ship in the second half of 2024.

Bill Koss (L) and Jitender Miglani.

Drut Technologies has detailed a system that links up to 4,096 accelerator chips. And further scaling, to 16,384 GPUs, is possible by combining four such systems in ‘availability zones’.

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Books in 2023

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. William Koss, Dean Bubley and Scott Wilkinson kick off this year's recommended reads.

William R Koss, CEO at Drut Technologies

My 2023 reading list is less than normal as the year has been full of technical reading and presentation materials for work. I enjoy history books as well as business history that tell the rise and fall of some company, industry or person.

In Progress 

Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring by Gordon Prange: I picked this book out of Amazon's recommendation list. Gordon Prange being the author of At Dawn We Slept and Tora, Tora, Tora. Currently plowing through this book that was unfinished at the time of his death.

The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge. My knowledge of the Crusades was thin and I was looking for a book that provided a grand overview. So far it has not disappointed, but I have had to familiarize myself with many new names.

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The long arm of PCI Express

Optical is being added as a second physical medium to the PCI Express (PCIe) data transfer protocol.

PCI Express is an electrical standard, but now the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has created a working group to standardise PCIe’s delivery optically.

PCI-SIG is already developing copper cabling specifications for the PCI Express 5.0 and 6.0 standards.

Source: PCI-SIG

Since each generation of PCIe doubles the data transfer rate, PCI-SIG member companies want copper cabling to help with the design of high-speed PCIe interconnects on a printed circuit board (PCB), between PCBs, and between racks (see diagram).

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Drut's agile optical fabric for the data centre

A US start-up has developed a photonic fabric for the data centre that pulls together the hardware needed for a computational task.

Drut Technologies offers management software and a custom line card, which, when coupled with the optical switch, grabs the hardware required for the workload.

Some of the Drut team (L to R): Sumit Jayaswal, member of technical staff; Bill Koss, CEO; and Jitender Miglani, founder and president.

“You can have a server with lots of resource machines: lots of graphic processing units (GPUs) and lots of memory,” says Bill Koss, CEO of Drut. “You create a machine, attach a workload to it and run it; forever, for a day, or 15 minutes.”

Drut first showcased its technology supporting the PCI Express (PCIe) bus over photonics at server specialist, SuperMicro’s exhibition stand, at the Supercomputing 22 show held last November in Dallas, Texas.

“This is a fully reconfigurable, direct-connect optical fabric for the data centre,” says Koss.

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