The 186th R-CCS Cafe

This presentation will introduce new optical devices that enable HPC and AI system architectures to free up from cost-prohibitive active optical cables and scale-limiting copper cables. Developed by parallel teams at HPE, VCSEL based and silicon photonics ring resonator technologies both enable passive optics at scale, and can integrate as mid-board, co-packaged or even 3D-stacked optical devices. These technologies set the course for much more capable interconnects, thanks to a significantly reduced cost structure and an energy profile tracking to sub 10 pJ/bit. Application at the system level will then be outlined, including the enablement of the Hyper-X and other multi-dimensional all to all topologies thanks to new components like fiber-shuffles.