One Man's Optocard Is Another Man's Green Computing

What do you find on "Optocards"? Optochips, of course. And I already know your next question: What the heck is an "Optowhatever"? For starters, you probably picked up on the "opto" suffix, which correctly suggests "optical." So Optocards are optically enabled circuit boards that conduct light between transmitters and receivers.

Why would you want to do this? Well, since the technology uses light instead of wires to send information, you could, for example, transmit 8 trillion bits (terabits) per second of information--equivalent to about 5000 high-definition video streams--using the power of a single 100-watt lightbulb.

Now that I've got your attention, I have to tell you that optochips are still in the prototype stage. The prototype, developed by IBM researchers, is designed to meet the bandwidth requirements for peta- and exa-flop supercomputing. The technology is referred to as "green computing" because it can save massive amounts of power in computers. For a typical 100 meter long link, the power consumed by the optical technology is 100 times less than today's electrical interconnects, and offers a power savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules. All in all, the IBM prototype is the world's fastest optical data bus. In addition to the optical data bus, IBM researchers have also developed a parallel optical transceiver module with a total bidirectional data transfer rate of 300 Gb/s.

Around here, of course, the boss isn't impressed by Optocards. What she wants is an "Optoeditor" who comes into the office on occasion and still gets things done on time.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:24 PM  Permalink