The most prolific information appliance today is a mobile device, typically a phone or a tablet. The near ubiquity of the internet makes it very easy to access vast amounts of information from these mobile devices. The storage and processing capability to support this infrastructure is increasingly in the datacenter and both the number of these warehouse scale computational (WSC) facilities and their size is increasing. Compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of both storage requirements and internet traffic is approximately 50%. Even more alarming is that in 2011, 2% of the total energy used in the United States was consumed by this information technology. Power and the attendant cooling requirements fundamentally affect both the cost of our IT infrastructure as well as what can be competitively designed. As VLSI technology scales, the power and speed of the transistors scale nicely but wires scale less favorably and the gap grows with every new process step. The telecom industry has long recognized the benefits of optical as opposed to electrical communication over long distances. However the definition of "long" changes with the signalling rate. Electrical signalling at high speeds consumes too much power, has significant signal integrity problems which limit bandwidth and at the WSC scale these issues border on catastrophic for future datacenters. Recent advances in silicon nanophotonics may well provide a solution to this problem. This talk will provide a brief introduction to silicon nanophotonic devices and then delve into how this technology can be used in the construction of more energy efficient datacenters of the future and discuss where this technology will be most useful and quantify the benefits for intra-datacenter networks.
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