About the talk: In this presentation, we will describe the world's first large-scale production deployment of lightwave fabrics composed of optical circuit switches (OCSes) and WDM interconnect, used in Google's datacenter and machine-learning (ML) networks. We first review the in-house developed OCS and optical transceiver technologies which enable the reconfigurable, low latency, data rate/format agnostic, and highly available lightwave fabric. We will then discuss system level results and benefits for both datacenter networks and large-scale ML systems, and conclude with future technology directions.

About the speaker: Dr. Ryohei Urata is currently a Principal Engineer/Director in the Platforms Optics Group, where he has defined/developed Google's datacenter optical technologies and corresponding roadmap for the past decade. Prior to joining Google, he was a research specialist at NTT Photonics Laboratories, Japan. He has over 150 patents, publications, and presentations in the areas of optical interconnect, switching, and networking. He received the B.S. degree in engineering physics from the University of California at Berkeley (Highest Honors), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University (Stanford Graduate Fellow). He was elected an Optica/OSA Fellow in 2022.