Title: A Flexible Optical Switching Architecture for Data Center Networks
Time: 10:00 AM, August 13
Place: 5407 Room, Software Building
Abstract:
Driven by technology advances and economic forces, data centers are being built around the world to support various infrastructure services and Internet/cloud applications. How to design a sustainable data center network architecture is a fundamental challenge for data center research. In this talk, I will focus on introducing OSA – a novel optical switching architecture for data center networks. At its core, by exploiting runtime reconfigurable optical devices, OSA flexibly adapts its topology and link capacities to various traffic patterns and thus achieves high network bisection bandwidth. The key idea I hope to deliver via OSA is that: a thin but flexible architecture, instead of a static fat one, can better support data center networking in a simple, power-efficient and cost-effective way.
We have evaluated and validated our OSA system via extensive analysis, simulations and prototype implementations.
Biography:
Kai Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Prior to this, he received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University respectively. His research interests include networks and networked systems, with emphasis on data center networks, resource management for cloud computing, Internet measurement and routing. He has published a series of top tier networking conferences and journals such as ACM SIGCOMM, USENIX NSDI, and IEEE Transactions on Networking, etc. His SIGCOMM’10 paper was nominated as ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper. He has actively collaborated with the industry such as Microsoft, AT&T, and NEC. He is particularly interested in finding simple yet deep and elegant solutions to practical challenging problems that generate real-world impact.