Experimental assessment of low latency and large port count OPS for data center network interconnect

The network interconnect within data center (DC) requires switches with large port count operating at high data-rates, and with low end-to-end latency (for computing communications often end-to-end latency < 1 μs), and consume low energy. In this work we demonstrate for the first time a modular OPS architecture for network interconnect in the DC with highly distributed control. Here we present experimental results for an 8×8 OPS optical module with forwarding operation of 8 input WDM channels at 40 Gb/s data rate to 8 output ports. We find a total latency of 25 ns and record low energy consumption of 76.5 pJ/bit. Error-free operation with 1.6 dB average power penalty was measured for all 8 switched channels. The modular architecture is representable for a 64×64 full OPS by employing 8 exact copies of the 8×8 optical modules.