Industry Forum 1: Optical Circuit Switching (OCS) for AI Reconfigurable Datacenter Network (RDCN): Devices, Systems and applications
Description:
The advent of AI/ML has accelerated scaling of training compute capacity, driving the required computation demands to double approximately every 6 months. Reflecting the recent slow-down in Moore’s law and the explosion workload, the performance, latency and power consumption of networks are becoming barriers in hyper scale data centres. One potential innovative solution is reconfigurable datacenter network (RDCN): datacenter networks whose large-scale topologies dynamically change over time enabled by optical circuit switching(OCS) technology.
OCS, however, introduces new problems. First, this is a change of paradigm that has a large impact on the network operation and management. New traffic engineering techniques have to be defined to benefit from OCS. Lower, deterministic latency impact on congestion and cannot be fully leveraged without changes of the layer-4 (TCP) protocols. The switching chip itself is adding losses, which need to be included in the transponder design or data center planning. The failure model of OCS switches is still relatively unknown and the impact of the failure of a single OCS in a data center may lead to dramatic traffic losses.
This industry forum aims to bring together leading academics and industry researchers to explore advances in devices and systems on optical circuit switching (OCS), AI RDCN structures and protocols, and in-depth discussion on future AI/ML data centre powered by optical circuit switching (OCS) technology.
Industry Forum 2: The Deep-Sea Technology Forum
Description:
The Deep-Sea Technology Forum, led by Hengtong Group and supported by the Jiangsu Marine Information Technology and Equipment Innovation Center, will take place in Suzhou from November 5th to 8th. It aims to create an innovation platform for future marine industries, deepen the research and development of common technologies, and establish a marine technology R&D highland in the Asia-Pacific region.
The forum will gather authoritative experts from top marine academic institutions. They will deliver reports and share insights. Participants will discuss the latest achievements and cutting-edge practices in marine communication and perception, analyze technological trends, and predict the industry’s future direction, promoting innovation and development in the Asia-Pacific’s deep-sea technology sector.
Additionally, the forum will facilitate joint efforts in key projects and promote the integration and sharing of innovative resources. Through discussions and exchanges, the forum aims to integrate R&D with commercial innovation in marine communication and perception in the Asia-Pacific region.
Industry Forum 3: Optical interconnects for AI computing
Description:
Datacenters have driven the fast development of pluggable optics in the past decade. Even the speeds of pluggable optical transceivers have been increased about 20 times, from 40 Gb/s a decade ago to 800 Gb/s today, they still fall behind switch ASIC bandwidth increase, which is about 100 times. Since 2023, generative AI has generated unprecedented demands on optical interconnects. AI computing clusters not only demand much larger interconnect bandwiths than before, but have higher requirements on power consumption, bandwidth density, latency and reliabilty for optical interconnects as well. Will pluggable optics contimue to be the main optical interconnect technologies for AI computing? Will new technologies including NPO, CPO, and OIO be better positioned for AI computing interconnects? This forum will bring together experts from various segments in our indusrty including end users, system vendors, optical transceiver and chip companies to discuss these questions.
