Lightwave Fabrics: At-Scale Optical Circuit Switching for Datacenter and Machine Learning Systems

We describe our experience developing what we believe to be the world’s first large-scale production deployments of lightwave fabrics used for both datacenter networking and machine-learning (ML) applications [1],[2],[3],[4]. Using optical circuit switches (OCSes) and optical transceivers developed in-house, we employ hardware and software codesign to integrate the fabrics into our network and computing infrastructure. Key to our design is a high degree of multiplexing enabled by new kinds of wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) and optical circulators that support high-bandwidth bidirectional traffic on a single strand of optical fiber. The development of the requisite OCS and optical transceiver technologies leads to a synchronous lightwave fabric that is reconfigurable, low latency, rate agnostic, and highly available. These fabrics have provided substantial benefits for long-lived traffic patterns in our datacenter networks and predictable traffic patterns in tightly-coupled machine learning clusters. We report results for a large-scale ML superpod with 4096 tensor processing unit (TPU) V4 chips that has more than one ExaFLOP of computing power [4]. For this use case, the deployment of a lightwave fabric provides up to 3× better system availability and model-dependent performance improvements of up to 3.3× compared to a static fabric, despite constituting less than 6% of the total system cost.