IBM researchers unveil green optical network technology prototype

[Jitway]

IBM researchers today unveiled the fastest and most highly integrated optical data bus ever developed. The prototype technology could bring massive amounts of bandwidth in an energy-efficient way to all kinds of machines—from cell phones to supercomputers. This could revolutionize the way we access, use and share information across many different applications.

 

The new technology uses light instead of wires to transmit information. This could allow, for example, the transmission of 8 terabits of data per second—equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams—using the power of a single 100-Watt lightbulb.

 

Bandwidth of this magnitude could greatly enhance the energy efficiencies of entire data centers and accelerate the sharing of large datasets. The potential advantages are far-reaching. Whether it's scientists crunching data to discover new drugs or to forecast the weather, people sharing high-definition movies on various devices, doctors sending high-definition medical images to a specialist for diagnosis within seconds while the patient is still in the office, or bringing the power of high-definition to mobile phones, the enormous bandwidth capacity of this new technology could change the way we work and live.

 

In the context of so-called green computing initiatives, the new optical technology could save massive amounts of power in supercomputers. For a typical 100-meter-long link, the power consumed by this new optical technology is 100 times less than today’s electrical interconnects. This translates into a power savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules.

 

The new prototype, called a "green optical link", is designed to meet the bandwidth requirements of petaflop and even exaflop supercomputing. As such, it constitutes a significant leap from related work announced by the same research team just one year ago. The new technology combines optical chips and optical data buses into a single package together with standard components.

 

 

 

This is truly amazing but will we ever see it in our lifetime to the extent of real life application. Would be nice to see these speeds one day.

 

Full story HERE

[Lucandrake]

O man, lagless gaming!! Is it possible? With the power of science, it'll one day become reality!!!

[Chibi Kami]

Higher speeds means faster p2p. I feel sorry for the FBI. Stopping software piracy is hard enough as it is (not that I'm complaining they haven't caught me yet).