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Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquium

Speaker/Affiliation: George P

orter/UC, San Diego

Date/Time: Friday, October 8, 2010, 1:00 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.402

Host: Yin Zhang

Talk Title: "A Hybrid

Electrical/Optical Switch Architecture for Modular Data Centers"

Talk

Abstract:
The basic building block of ever larger data centers has shifte

d from a rack to a modular container with hundreds or even thousands of ser

vers. Delivering scalable bandwidth among such containers is a challenge. A
number of recent efforts promise full bisection bandwidth between all serv

ers, though with significant cost, complexity, and power consumption. We
present Helios, a hybrid electrical/optical switch architecture that can

deliver significant reductions in number of switching elements, cabling,

cost, and power consumption relative to recently proposed data center netw

ork architectures. In this talk, I''ll explore architectural tradeoffs and
challenges associated with realizing these benefits through the evaluation
of a fully functional Helios prototype.

Speaker Bio:
George Porter

is a Research Scientist in the Center for Networked Systems at UC San Diego

. His research interests include improving the scale, efficiency, and rel

iability of large-scale distributed systems, with a current focus on the d

atacenter. Prior to joining UCSD, George was a Principal Investigator at S

un Microsystems and member of the RAD Lab, a multidisciplinary research ce

nter at U.C. Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Californi

a, Berkeley, and a B.S. from the University of Texas at Austin.