@inproceedings{ghobadi2016projector,
author = {Ghobadi, Manya and Mahajan, Ratul and Phanishayee, Amar and Devanur, Nikhil and Kulkarni, Janardhan (Jana) and Ranade, Gireeja and Blanche, Pierre-Alexandre and Rastegarfar, Houman and Glick, Madeleine and Kilper, Daniel},
title = {ProjecToR: Agile Reconfigurable Data Center Interconnect},
booktitle = {ACM SIGCOMM 2016},
year = {2016},
month = {August},
abstract = {We explore a novel, free-space optics based approach for building data center interconnects. It uses a digital micromirror device (DMD) and mirror assembly combination as a transmitter and a photodetector on top of the rack as a receiver. Our approach enables all pairs of racks to establish direct links, and we can reconfigure such links (i.e., connect different rack pairs) within 12 us. To carry traffic from a source to a destination rack, transmitters and receivers in our interconnect can be dynamically linked in millions of ways. We develop topology construction and routing methods to exploit this flexibility, including a flow scheduling algorithm that is a constant factor approximation to the offline optimal solution. Experiments with a small prototype point to the feasibility of our approach. Simulations using realistic data center workloads show that, compared to the conventional folded-Clos interconnect, our approach can improve mean flow completion time by 30-95% and reduce cost by 25-40%.

More details here.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/projector-agile-reconfigurable-data-center-interconnect-3/},
}