Optical communications make data centres more efficient

Major data centres and supercomputers become even more more cost and energy efficient, while becoming even more powerful.

Fraunhofer scientists and 17 partners from business and research in the European Union have set themselves this ambitious goal in the ''PhoxTroT'' project. The key is optical data transmission.

Over the next four years, the project partners will be studying synergies between existing solutions as well as developing new technologies and strategies.
 
Gigantic data centres of cloud providers consume energy at an extraordinary rate. For example, Google's server farms process many petabytes of data and they consume 260 million watts, enough power for a city of 200,000 households. The need to save energy is equally powerful.

These facts led the European Union to initiate the PhoxTroT project, coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin. The goal is to cut the energy consumption by at least 50 per cent, while simultaneously doubling the capacity of data connections to 2 terabits per second (Tb/s). This would also significantly reduce costs.

Data transmission using light consumes only a fraction of the energy that conventional methods need. The technologies for photonic transmission already exist and have been thoroughly researched. "The novelty of the PhoxTroT project is that we are now researching the synergies between the various technology components and are combining them with each other in a new research plan based on the 'mix-and-match' principle," explains project coordinator Dr Tolga Tekin from IZM.

By the end of the project, entirely new technologies are expected to emerge that can guarantee a photonic data connection that remains constant across hundreds of kilometres. For this purpose, the project partners are developing three prototypes for various hierarchy levels.