Experiences and challenges in building next-gen optically disaggregated datacenters : Invited Paper

Abstract

While disaggregation has been successfully used for more than two decades to separate storage from compute (i.e., SAN/NAS systems), disaggregating tightly coupled resources like CPU, memory or accelerators has been so far considered unfeasible due to the hard dependency between their performance and the latency and bandwidth provided by their physical interconnect. We argue that modern optical networks make full datacenter disaggregation feasible in practice. We present our ongoing work on disaggregation by introducing the dReDBox architecture that completely separates datacenter resources into modular physical units interconnected via a high speed reconfigurable optical network. We discuss the current prototype and highlight challenges and work ahead.