NSF Awards CNS $1.8 million in Support of Data Center Research!

CNS is pleased to announce that George Porter and Alex Snoeren were awarded a three year NSF NeTS Large grant for their work on hybrid circuit/packet data center designs. Though the demand to increase the scale of data centers is ever increasing, growth is currently limited by the problem of being able to provide sufficient internal network connectivity. In their project proposal, Porter and Snoeren suggest that a solution to this problem could be reached by abandoning today’s electrically packet-switched technology and adopting optical circuit switching. If they are successful, they will develop a hybrid switch that will have a capacity that is several orders of magnitude greater than an electrical packet switch and yet whose performance will be largely indistinguishable from the current technology. However, the change in technology will also necessitate a complete revolution in the way that data centers are networked.