From chip to cloud: Optical interconnects in engineered systems for the enterprise

The server compute landscape is changing. The traditional model of building general-purpose enterprise compute boxes, that end-users can use in various combinations with storage and networking to assemble their desired compute environments, has evolved to purpose-built systems optimized for specific applications. This tight integration of hardware and software components allows for unprecedented levels of switching and compute efficiencies and has fueled the penetration of optical interconnects deep "inside the box", particularly for switch scale-up. We present an 8.2Tb/s Infiniband packet switch with 41 ports running 100Gb/s per port interconnected by 12-channel mid-board optical transceivers with 25Gb/s per channel per direction of optical I/O. These components enable systems with up to 49Tb/s bandwidth in a 2U standard rack mount configuration.