Seagate Technology and PETRA have formed a joint collaboration to develop advanced optical interconnects for future data centres.
PETRA, the developer of world-leading photonics devices, packaging and integration technologies, is creating disruptive optical interconnect technologies to make it commercially viable for large scale deployment in future exascale data centres.
Seagate will be working with PETRA to deploy some of the prototype technologies as part of the European Nephele and PhoxTrot projects. For these initiatives PETRA will contribute their optical I/O core technology. The optical I/O core technology is developed as a project supported by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization), which Seagate will incorporate into data centre system prototypes. The collaboration signals the first time a systems company, such as Seagate, will be working with PETRA in this field.
· NEPHELE, a European collaborative project, is developing a dynamic optical network infrastructure that aims to overcome current architectural limitations and drastically reduce cost and power consumption, enabling cloud data centres to scale gracefully.
· PhoxTrot is a large-scale research European programme focusing on high-performance, low-energy and cost and small-size optical interconnects across the different hierarchy levels in data centre and high-performance computing systems: on-board, board-to-board and rack-to-rack.
