The major annual conference for the optical networking industry has announced expanded programming and exhibitor participation to place greater emphasis on the growing role fiber optics technology will play to meet bandwidth and power challenges in datacom, cloud computing and data center networking applications.
The technical conference programming for this year's Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC 2012), to be held in Los Angeles, March 4–8, will include highlights such as a keynote address by Google’s Milo Medin, vice president, Access Services, as well as workshops, technical paper presentations and panel discussions with industry leaders from companies including Facebook, NEC Systems and Fujitsu, among others.
Datacom products and services will also be well represented among the event's more than 500 exhibitors, with participation from companies including Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu Network Communications, Google Fiber, Huawei, Infinera, Nokia Siemens and Juniper.
“Our industry is seeing a convergence of computing resources and communications infrastructure, which has resulted in an emerging area of optical communication applications driven by data centers and cloud computing,” comments Keren Bergman of Columbia University, chair of the OFC/NFOEC subcommittee on Optical Networking, Technologies, and Applications for Datacom and Computercom. “At OFC/NFOEC this year, we are bringing together both vendors and systems providers to redirect the efforts toward these emerging applications in order to solve problems related to bandwidth and energy consumption.”
Highlights of the 2012 event's datacom programming will include:
Plenary Session: Tuesday, March 6
--Bandwidth, Optics and the Age of Abundance - Keynote presentation by Milo Medin, vice president, Access Services, Google
--How to Design and Build Your Very Own Exascale Computer - Keynote Presentation by Greg Papadopoulos, Ph.D., venture partner, New Enterprise Associates
Show Floor Programming: Tuesday, March 6 – Thursday, March 8
--Cloud Computing as a Service - Service Provider Summit keynote address by Stuart Elby, Ph.D., vice president, Network Architecture and Technology & chief technologist, Verizon Digital Media Services, Verizon, USA
--Lighting Up the Data Center - Panel moderated by Brad Booth, director of network architecture, Office of the CTO, Dell Inc., USA
--Advanced Integrated Photonics - Market Watch panel moderated by Ted Schmidt, Ph.D., director, Optical Systems Technology, Juniper Networks, USA
Workshop: Monday, March 5
--Optics in the Data Center: How Can We Efficiently Move and Control Large Amounts of Data? - Workshop organized by Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur, McGill Univ, Canada; Laurent Schares, IBM, USA
Technical Presentations: Sunday, March 4 – Thursday, March 8:
--Delivering Scale Out Data Center Networking with Optics – Why and How, Amin Vahdat, Google/UC Davis
--Design Principles in the Open Compute Project, Eitan Frachtenberg, Facebook, USA
--Future Computing Architectures Enabled by Optical and Nanophotonic Interconnects, Moray McLaren, HP, USA
--Optical Interconnect Opportunities in Supercomputers and High End Computing, Alan Benner, IBM
--Optical Networking for Data Centers Across Wide Area Networks, Joe Berthold, Ciena, USA
--Optically Interconnected Data Center Networks, Lei Xu, NEC Labs America, USA
--Energy Efficiency and Scalability of Multi-plane Optical Interconnection Networks for Computing Platforms and Data Centers, Piero Castoldi, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento (SSSUP), Italy
--Cost-effective Transceiver Technologies for High-bandwidth Optical Interconnection in High-end Server Systems, Tanaka Kazuhiro, Fujitsu Labs., Ltd., Japan
Short Courses: Sunday, March 4 – Monday, March 5
--Datacenter Networking 101, Cedric Lam and Hong Liu, Google, USA
--Cloud Computing and Dynamic Networks, George Clapp, Telcordia Technologies, USA; Douglas Freimuth, IBM Research, USA
--Computercom Interconnects: Circuits and Equalization Methods for Short Reach Power-Efficient Optical and --Electrical Links, Alexander Rylyakov, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA
--Data Center Cabling: Transitioning from Copper to Fiber, Lisa Huff; DataCenterStocks.com, USA, Discerning Analytics, LLC, USA
The complete OFC/NFOEC schedule is available online. A full list of key OFC/NFOEC datacom programming is available at the OFC/NFOEC website.
