Helios project

Represented the first effort at building a data center interconnect by combining optical circuit switching with electrical packet switching. We built Helios using commercial optical switches which could only reconfigure slowly, limiting their use for highly aggregated traffic in the network core. This project demonstrated the feasibility of circuit switching in datacenter networks.

Publications

Helios: A Hybrid Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers, Nathan Farrington, George Porter, Sivasankar Radhakrishnan, Hamid Bazzaz, Vikram Subramanya, Yeshaiahu Fainman, George Papen, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, New Delhi, India, August 2010.

Switching the Optical Divide: Fundamental Challenges for Hybrid Electrical/Optical Datacenter Networks, Hamid Hajabdolali Bazzaz, Malveeka Tewari, Guohui Wang, George Porter, T. S. Eugene Ng, David G. Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, Michael A. Kozuch, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC), Cascais, Portugal, October 2011.