During the Helios project, we observed a fundamental connection between how fast one can reconfigure the circuit switch and its ability to support dynamic, changing traffic. Since no commercial switches could meet our requirements, we created the Mordia (Microsecond Optical Research Datacenter Interconnect Architecture) switch, which operates three orders of magnitude faster than commercially available devices. To do this, we leveraged binary 2D-MEMS mirror arrays with a reconfiguration time of 12 microseconds. While faster than Helios, each individual switch can only support a very small number of ports, e.g., 4 to 16, and thus a key aspect of the Mordia project was chaining 2D-MEMS switches together to increase the overall port count. Our approach to scheduling in Mordia was based on Birkhoff-von~Neumann decomposition.
Publications
Practical TDMA for Datacenter Ethernet, Bhanu Vattikonda, George Porter, Amin Vahdat, and Alex C. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM European Conference in Computer Systems (EuroSys), Bern, Switzerland, April 2012.
A Demonstration of Ultra-low Latency Data Center Optical Circuit Switching (Demo session), Nathan Farrington, George Porter, Pang-Chen Sun, Alex Forencich, Joseph Ford, Yeshaiahu Fainman, George Papen, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Helsinki, Finland, August 2012.
Hunting Mice with Microsecond Circuit Switches, Nathan Farrington, George Porter, Yeshaiahu Fainman, George Papen, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XI), Redmond, WA, October 2012.
A 10 us Hybrid Optical-Circuit/Electrical-Packet Network for Data Centers, Nathan Farrington, Alex Forencich, Pang-Chen Sun, Shaya Fainman, Joe Ford, Amin Vahdat, George Porter, and George C. Papen, Proceedings of OFC/NFOEC, Anaheim, CA, March 2013.
Optical/Electrical Hybrid Switching for Datacenter Communications, Nathan Farrington, George Porter, Alex Forencich, Joseph Ford, Yeshaiahu Fainman, Amin Vahdat, and George Papen, Proceedings of the 18th OptoElectronics and Communications Conference (OECC2013) / Photonics in Switching 2013 (PS2013), Kyoto, Japan, July 2013.
Integrating Microsecond Circuit Switching into the Data Center, George Porter, Richard Strong, Nathan Farrington, Alex Forencich, Pang-Chen Sun, Tajana Rosing, Yeshaiahu Fainman, George Papen, and Amin Vahdat, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Hong Kong, China, August 2013.
A Multiport Microsecond Optical Circuit Switch for Data Center Networking, Nathan Farrington, Alex Forencich, George Porter, Pang-Chen Sun, Joseph Ford, Yeshaiahu Fainman, George C. Papen, and Amin Vahdat, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters 25(16):1589-1592, 2013.
Directing Data Center Traffic, Yeshaiahu Fainman and George Porter, Science 342(6155):202-203, 2013.