A Trip to China and A Top500 Award for Quadwire

This week’s Lightspeed post comes from guest blogger Tony Pearson, Finisar’s Director of Product Marketing.

A “lightspeed” visit to China! It was a short journey of only 3 days, with two halves and a tale of two cities, separated by a virtual “Great Wall”. The first half: a visit to Shanghai, both the city and one of the jewels in the Finisar homegrown facility treasury. The second: to Tianjin (approx. 150km from Beijing) to visit Dawning Information Industry Company Ltd. and their Nebulae Supercomputer installation. The virtual “Great Wall” I refer to was simply the barrier thrown up by Mother Nature to domestic flight schedules – during rainy season in Beijing we are reminded that no matter how fast our communication solutions become…she’s still the boss! I’ll focus on two halves and the cities for this post, but I’m always happy to recount my travel stories to the interested in a future blog post.

Let me begin with an event that I was honored to attend at the Dawning manufacturing facility in June for those companies, including Finisar, who helped enable the world’s #2 supercomputer “Nebulae” as ranked by the 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list. The event celebrated a milestone for Dawning as the #1 Supercomputer solution vendor in China and #2 in the world in terms of performance as ranked by the Top 500. Dawning further honored Finisar with a commemorative award for participation in Nebulae.

The Nebulae Supercomputer was at the center of the celebration with the event including a tour of Nebulae itself. The exciting thing for me, personally, was to see a supercomputer with over 120 server racks connected using Quadwire™ Active Optical Cables. This excitement only perhaps topped by the fact that these cables were designed and manufactured by Finisar at the very facility I visited the previous day.

Although not my first visit to China, this was my first visit to Shanghai and the Finisar Shanghai R&D and Manufacturing facility. Shanghai is truly a city in the fast lane, quite literally with some of the best kept and most functional highways I’ve seen in the world. With all eyes currently on the World Expo site located on the Huang Pu River running through the heart of downtown, this is a city in the same mold as Singapore, New York, London or Hong Kong, in my opinion, with a very cosmopolitan feel and population. With an infectious air of both maturity and optimism, this is a city that makes you want to keep coming back. The same is true of the Finisar Shanghai team and site in its newer location with a mix of both locally and globally educated talent, with a vast wealth of experience in the fiber optics business.

While this trip was focused on the high tech: high tech cities, high tech facilities, high tech computer solutions and high tech fiber optics, the real story here for me was about two Laws of Nature: “Bandwidth x Distance” limits combined with our relentless need for more information, pushing fiber solutions over longer distances now to our homes and to the Supercomputer in its most recent incarnation. And, then of course Mother Nature, who stamped her laws on my ability to move around China if not the data in the highly controlled environment of the Nebulae Supercomputer installation.

Finisar’s Tony Pearson (left) visits Dawning for a tour of the Nebulae – the World’s #2 Supercomputer as ranked by the 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list.

ISC 2010 Wrap-Up –What’s Hot in Supercomputing

This week’s blog post comes from Katharine Schmidtke, Finisar’s Strategic Marketing Manager.

I had the pleasure of attending the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) event May 31-June 3, in Hamburg Germany. The show was well attended and appeared to have doubled in size from last year. In attendance were all the major industry suppliers and leading technology providers such as Mellanox, QLogic, Voltaire, NVidia, HP, IBM, Cray, Oracle, AMD, Intel, LSI, Supermicro and STEC. Key themes included supercomputing, storage and networking. Of those, hot trends discussed were cloud and parallel computing as well as the future developments to come in the next 10 years. The trend to higher bandwidth continues, with the IBTA announcing the latest roadmap which adds a new datarate at FDR (14 Gbps) in addition to EDR (26 Gbps). InfiniBand is targeting 300 Gbps by 2011 in a 12 lane format running at 26Gbps per lane.

And as I sat through the presentations and spoke to some of the folks on the show floor, it became evident that there are two central themes underpinning all the major business and HPC initiatives – latency and flexibility. Reducing latency is key for supercomputers, while flexibility is the driver in cloud computing. NVidia made quite a splash with their Tesla C2050 GPUs which are used to improve data crunching speeds in many supercomputers, including the new #2 supercomputer – the Nebulae system built by Dawning in China. Dr. Wilfried Oed from Cray shared some of the secrets in the new XE-6 supercomputer including the new Gemini network card which he admits is “more than just a router” by increasing processing speeds using a clever non-blocking routing system.

On the news front, the biannual 35th edition of the Top 500 supercomputer list was released. The U.S. continues to take the lead in the number one spot with Jaguar, the fastest supercomputer system used for The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Computing Facility. Trailing close behind and ranked second on the list is Nebulae, China’s fastest system worldwide.

Other noteworthy technical initiatives point to Intel, who dominates the high-end process market with roughly 82% of all systems and over 90% of quad-core based systems. IBM recoups the lead in market share by total systems and overall performance from Hewlet-Packard (HP). And exciting for Finisar – we were part of the 120 Gb/s InfiniBand demonstration at this year’s event. Check out the press release issued by the HPC Advisory Council to learn more.

Until next year’s ISC show, Auf Wiedersehen, as they say in German!

The Silent War and the Yellow Wall

There is a silent war that has been brewing for years in our industry. Not everybody knows it, but we refer to it as the war between optics and copper. I will have several postings on this subject in the coming weeks. There are many fundamental limitations of copper, and as a fiber guy I am acutely aware of all these limitations.

Let me start with my favorite one – this photo below. We call it the yellow wall. We have heard of installations using heavy CX4 copper cable, where the “wall” of copper was so heavy the system required reinforcements to avoid toppling over due to the weight of the copper pulling it.

Stay tuned for more on this topic.

SC09: And the winner is…

As promised we are excited to announce the winning result from our Laserwire® weight competition at Supercomputing 09.

Our question was: What is the % savings in weight of a 10 meter Laserwire active optical cable compared to a 10 meter RJ-45 cat6a cable?

The correct answer is: 85.46%

Check out the pictures of the Laserwire 10m cable weighing in at 98 grams and the Cat6a 10m cable with 674 grams.

The iPOD will go to the lucky winner from Stanford University who had the closest guess of 85.5%.

For more information about low latency, low power, low weight and low cost 10GbE connectivity please visit our website.

5 Minutes with Jag Bolaria, Linley Group

Last month the Linley Group hosted the Data Center Networking seminar in San Jose, California. We took a few moments with Linley analyst, Jag Bolaria, to talk about the future of the optics industry and specifically his view on the war between Optics and Copper technologies.

JM: In the early 2000’s, the general view was that the telecommunications industry had significantly over-invested in fiber optic infrastructure – do you think the investment has caught up with the industry needs of today?

JB: Yes, a lot of money went into the telecom infrastructure and that was followed by a significant cut back in new equipment. In fact, this cut back continued for more than seven years. Since 2000, the traffic mix has shifted dramatically to data from voice—and in the future video will drive further growth in traffic. This new makeup of traffic requires an infrastructure that is designed more for data and video rather than built upon voice technologies. Consequently, in 2009 and 2010 we are at the beginning of an update to the telecom infrastructure—an update that will shift the infrastructure technologies from TDM and SONET/SDH to packet traffic, Carrier Ethernet and OTN.

JM: What areas in fiber optic infrastructure do you foresee organizations investing in as we move into 2010?

JB: The fiber optic infrastructure growth will be driven by OTN technologies, which include data rates of 40Gbps and 100Gbps. Much of this growth will be driven by carriers and a need by the carriers to consolidate multiple transport technologies to OTN and Carrier Ethernet.

JM: When do you predict the war between Optics and Copper will end – or will it?

JB: Instead of a war, we see these as complementary technologies for the most part. Clearly, long haul uses optics today and will continue to use optics. In the Enterprise, distances greater than 100 meters will continue to be optics. At 10Gbps, optics offers a low power solution, which will continue to dominate for several years. Once 10GBase-T can reduce power dissipation to less than 2W, it will offer another alternative for OEMs and end users. This alternative will be particularly attractive for LOM designs. In this type of the larger landscape, we expect both copper and optics to continue shipping volume in millions of units.

JM: How do you see the Optics Components vendor landscape evolving over the next 5 years?

JB: We expect 10Gbps optical port shipments to increase rapidly for the next 3-5 years. This will lead to further consolidation and will favor vertically integrated suppliers for optical modules.

Thanks for your time today, Jag.