Suyash Sinha

Direct Network Prototype Leveraging Light Peak Technology

Light Peak is a new optical interconnect technology developed by Intel and targeted at connecting computing and consumer electronic devices. It provides bandwidth of 10Gbps and higher using optical fiber technology, but at extremely low cost. This paper investigates whether Light Peak technology can be leveraged to form the basis of a low-cost, high performance, scalable network. This paper presents our feasibility analysis, supported by a prototype network we constructed. The prototype consisted of a number of Light Peak PCI-Express cards, each with one host interface, an integrated switch, and transceiver pair with four optical ports. With very small forwarding delays, Light Peak supports direct networks with topologies that have interesting traffic characteristics suitable for small-scale clusters (containers with 1,000-10,000 servers).

Prometheus: a wirelessly interconnected, pico-datacenter framework for the developing world

The promise of cloud computing is, nowadays, mostly limited to the developed regions of the world where, approximately, only one half of the worlds population lives. In this paper, we present an attempt to bring the cloud to the majority populations of the developing world, with the help of long-distance, wirelessly connected and renewable-energy-powered pico-datacenters, the Prometheus nodes. Along with the physical layer and ad-hoc network routing characteristics of the prototype nodes, the challenges and potential solutions in designing such a network with constraints on renewable energy availability, bandwidth and connectivity to the Internet are discussed. With this multifaceted theoretical and experimental analysis, we believe that not only does the pico-DC framework constitute a highly viable solution for the developing world to share computational resources and storage services over wireless links but also that Prometheus can significantly help to improve multiple socioeconomic aspects of the populations of the developing world.