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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

#OPTICS: "Intel's Silicon Photonics Supercharging Facebook"

Supercomputers have long used expensive Fibre Channel optical interconnects to allow its processors, networking and storage racks to be separated, but most datacenters have been shackled by copper interconnects that require processors, networking and storage modules to be present in each rack. Now Intel's ultra-cheap silicon photonics is allowing Facebook to build new data centers using optical interconnects that are are fast as a supercomputer, but as cheap as copper: R. Colin Johnson @NextGenLog

Intel's inexpensive silicon photonic devices allow tiny fiber optical cables to replace bulky expensive copper for interconnecting compute, storage and networking resources in the datacenter. SOURCE: Intel

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