Using LED-based parallelism for fast optical interconnects

Avicena Tech has demonstrated what it claims is the world's smallest one-terabit optical transceiver. And the company will reveal more about how it is advancing its optical technology for volume production at the upcoming OFC event in San Diego in March.

Christoph Pfistner demonstrating the microLED-based 1Tbps interface at Supercomputing 23 in Denver, Colorado.

The interface technology uses compact light emitting diodes (LED). The interface uses an array of these microLEDs that emit light vertically into a bundle of multimode optical fibres.

Avicena demonstrated its 1 terabit-per-second (Tbps) interface at the recent Supercomputing 23 show in Colorado last November. Its interface used 304 LED-based optical channels, each carrying 3.3 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) of data for a total bandwidth of one terabit.

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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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The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics

The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.

Jeffery Maki

The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.

The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition's board.

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Books of 2023 - Final part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the final part, contributions are from Larry Dennison, Tim Doiron, Catherine White and Neil McRae.

Larry Dennison, Network Research Group, Nvidia

At this point in my life, book reading is to unwind and is mostly fiction. I get nearly everything else from reading selected technical papers, the daily news and Real Clear Politics. There is just so much cognitive dissonance in the news and editorials that I retreat into fantasy for some down-time.

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Broadcoms taps AI to improve switch chip traffic analysis

Broadcom's Trident 5-X12 networking chip is the company's first to add an artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing engine.

The latest Trident, Tomahawk, and Jericho devices. Source: Broadcom.

Data centre operators can use their network traffic to train the chip's neural network. The Trident 5's inference engine, dubbed the Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer or NetGNT, is loaded with the resulting trained model to classify traffic and detect security threats.

"It is the first time we have put a neural network focused on traffic analysis into a chip," says Robin Grindley, principal product line manager with Broadcom's Core Switching Group.

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Books of 2023 - Part 3

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 3, Noam Mizrahi, Katharine Schmidtke, Steve Suarez, and Vladimir Kozlov share their readings of the year.

Noam Mizrahi, EVP, corporate CTO at Marvell.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek is a book about the obvious. It is so obvious, in fact, that it is very hard to do. We all want our message to get through so that people understand, see things through our eyes and share our vision.

When we start a journey, we know very well why we do it. This is also when we inspire and motivate the most, ourselves and others. But, as we develop our company, products and careers, intuitively, routine makes us focus on what we do and how we do it, and in some (or many) cases, we forget why we do it.

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Books of 2023 - Part 2

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 2, Alan Liu, Yves LeMaitre, and, in this case, the editor of Gazettabyte list their recommended reads.

A foreign cathedral .... in RennesAlan Liu, CEO & Co-Founder at Quintessent Inc.

One book that left a deep impression on me is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a recounting and reflection by the author of his time as a prisoner in various concentration camps during WWII.

I listened to the audiobook mostly during commutes to work at the beginning of the year. Whatever challenges awaited me for the day, no matter how big, they seemed less daunting when reframed against the book's stories.

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