Direct Network Prototype Leveraging Light Peak Technology

Light Peak is a new optical interconnect technology developed by Intel and targeted at connecting computing and consumer electronic devices. It provides bandwidth of 10Gbps and higher using optical fiber technology, but at extremely low cost. This paper investigates whether Light Peak technology can be leveraged to form the basis of a low-cost, high performance, scalable network. This paper presents our feasibility analysis, supported by a prototype network we constructed. The prototype consisted of a number of Light Peak PCI-Express cards, each with one host interface, an integrated switch, and transceiver pair with four optical ports. With very small forwarding delays, Light Peak supports direct networks with topologies that have interesting traffic characteristics suitable for small-scale clusters (containers with 1,000-10,000 servers).