This includes Intel's innovative new photonic architecture for racks, which will illustrate the total cost, design, and reliability advantages of a decentralized rack environment.
The new architecture is the culmination of over a decade of research, dedicated to developing a family of silicon-based photonic devices, including lasers, modulators, and detectors, that utilize low-cost silicon modules. These devices will enable the seamless integration of photonics with unprecedented speed and energy efficiency. Silicon photonics is a new approach to photonics, using photons of light to transmit massive amounts of data at extremely high speeds over thin fiber optic cables with minimal power consumption, instead of using conventional electrical signals over copper wires. Intel has spent the last two years testing and developing production-ready silicon photonic technologies and has just produced the first engineering samples.
Silicon photonics technology, being produced from silicon, a very low-cost material, rather than expensive exotic materials, offers a significant cost-effective advantage over older optical technologies, in addition to providing greater speed, reliability, and scalability. Thus, companies with server farms or large data centers can eliminate the significant bottlenecks that limit their performance and ensure greater long-term upgrade possibilities, while significantly reducing their operating costs, both in terms of space and energy.
The greater efficiency of silicon photonics and decentralization:
Companies with large data centers can significantly reduce their capital expenditures by decentralizing or separating their storage and computing resources within a single server rack. Server decentralization refers to separating the resources that are currently combined in a single rack, including compute units, storage, networking, and power distribution, into dedicated modules. Traditionally, each server rack has its own set of resources. By decentralizing this format, different types of resources can be grouped and distributed throughout the rack, resulting in easier expansion, greater flexibility and reliability, and reduced costs.
By separating critical components, each computing resource can be upgraded or expanded independently without affecting the other components. This leads to a longer lifecycle for each resource and allows system administrators to replace a single resource without having to replace entire systems. This results in greater flexibility and easier repair and maintenance, which in turn reduces overall infrastructure investment and costs while offering greater robustness and reliability. Furthermore, this technology provides added improvements in thermal efficiency by allowing for more optimal component placement within a rack.
The mechanical prototype presented demonstrates Intel's photonic rack architecture, which interconnects diverse resources, illustrating how the computing, networking, and storage resources of a rack server can be decentralized. Intel will contribute a design for a photonic receptacle to the Open Compute Project (OCP) and will work closely with Facebook*, Corning*, and others to eventually arrive at a standardized design. The mechanical prototype features a distributed input/output (I/O) solution using Intel's Ethernet switching silicon, which will be compatible with Intel® Xeon® processors and the next generation of Intel® Atom™ systems-on-chip (SoCs), currently in production at a 22-nanometer process and codenamed "Avoton," which will be released later this year.
The mechanical prototype shown represents the latest evolution of decentralized racks with distributed switching capabilities.
