Published July 29, 2011

…Optical System Buses: This refers to the use of optical signalling to replace electrical connections in system buses. Optical transducers will appear in memory, interconnects and processor modules, significantly reducing pin counts while boosting performance.

Gartner believes optical system buses have the potential to displace technologies such as HyperTransport and QuickPath Interconnect through single or dual-fibre interfaces.

Gartner predicts server density and performance scaling to continue through to at least 2022, supported in part by a transition to optical system buses. Gartner analyst, Carl Clauch, said racks using internal optical fabric could contain 1,000 or more servers, all interconnected with an optical backplane at high bus speeds.

“This technology will allow data centre processing capacity to continue on an exponential path,” he said.

Vendors investing in this technology include IBM, Intel, Kotura and Lightfleet. In fact, Lightfleet recently delivered a prototype to Microsoft Research — a 32-blade cluster using crisscrossing beams of light in 8-inch cubes as the cluster interconnect….

Read the entire article on Computerworld.com

Lightfleet Wins The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Award in Computing Systems

CAMAS, Wash. – September 29, 2010 - Lightfleet Corporation today announced that it won top-honors in the Computing Systems category of The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Awards.

“We are honored to be recognized by The Wall Street Journal with this prestigious award”

Lightfleet’s Direct Broadcast Optical Interconnect (DBOI) system uses broadcast light to reinvent the way computing nodes are connected in next generation data centers. It creates a switchless optical fabric that enables all nodes to communicate with all other nodes simultaneously, breaking the performance barriers of today’s typical interconnect architectures. Engineered to meet the growing demands for green computing in an energy-efficient, high density form factor, Lightfleet’s capabilities offer unique parallel computing opportunities that allow for building efficient, high-performance cloud infrastructures that deliver more scalability, power savings and cost savings than ever before.

This year, winners in 17 categories were chosen from 597 applicants by a panel of judges from research institutions and venture-capital firms, among other companies. Competition was fierce, and applicants were assessed on three criteria:

• Does the innovation break with conventional ideas or processes in its field?
• Does it go beyond marginal improvements on something that already exists?
• Will it have a wide impact on future technology in its field or in other fields?

“An economic downturn simply couldn’t constrain the awesome innovation energy that exists around the world,” said Scott D. Anthony, managing director of Innosight Ventures and one of the judges of the awards. “It gives one a lot of hope for the future. A number of the applicants have the potential to literally change the world.”

“We are honored to be recognized by The Wall Street Journal with this prestigious award,” said John Peers, Lightfleet CEO, “Lightfleet’s technology fundamentally changes the way communication among computing systems is achieved, producing massive advantages for data centers and cloud computing environments, from high-performance to general purpose computing.”

About Lightfleet Corp.

Lightfleet was founded in 2003 by a team of individuals seeking to deliver simplified solutions in the increasingly complex world of computing. Drawing from diverse backgrounds in optics, signal processing, neural computing, massively parallel processing, and semiconductor design, Lightfleet is uniquely positioned to design faster, cooler, and more compact platforms than have previously existed. By leveraging the properties of light, Lightfleet brings enhanced value to our customers and partners in the form of efficient, flexible, and affordable systems to meet a range of compute needs including transaction processing, data mining, visualization, simulation, and high-throughput, large-scale application processing. Lightfleet’s headquarters are located in Camas, Washington. More information is available at http://www.lightfleet.com. Investors and OEMs should contact sales@lightfleet.com, Media should contact media@lightfleet.com.

This year the Innovation Awards judges chose winners in 17 categories. Here’s a look at the winning entries.

Computing Systems

Lightfleet Corp., based in Camas, Wash., won in this category for a novel way of connecting computer processors, using beamed light instead of copper or fiber-optic wires.

In big data centers, even the fastest servers get slowed by bottlenecks in the connections between microprocessors, or nodes. Lightfleet’s technology aims to eliminate the bottlenecks by replacing the wired switches typically used to manage these connections with a device that sends a data-carrying beam of light to all the nodes at once. The faster transmission of data promises to make it possible, for example, to run Wall Street’s high-speed trading operations more efficiently.

[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

Written by Curt Schwaderer for CompactPCI Advanced and Micro TCA Systems August, 2010

In my November 2008 column, I wrote about a paradigm-shifting optical switching technology being developed by Lightfleet Corporation (http:// www.compactpci-systems.com/articles/id/?3521). The technology promised to be a significantly disruptive, enabling new architectures for a variety of applications requiring low latency switching with broadcasting properties.

Since that article was published I have received a number of emails asking about an update on the technology and the company.

So in this month’s column I decided to catch up with Lightfleet and get a technical update on its optical switching technology called Direct Broadcast Optical Interconnect (DBOI).

Jim Burke, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Lightfleet Corporation, gave me a great update on the DBOI technology, applications, current status, and some future directions.

[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

Imagine for a moment that firms on Wall Street can execute trades and trading algorithms much faster, where trading even milliseconds faster can mean millions in profits; or that the military can put high-density analytics systems like facial recognition in command aircrafts to speed intelligence, decision support and response efforts; or that today’s leading Internet service providers and search engines can dramatically accelerate services while cutting power and cooling costs in half and minimizing server footprints in over-crowded data centers. [ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

by George Lawton

A company has delivered the first version of a product that uses light signals, instead of cables and switches, to connect blade-server nodes. Lightfleet has sold and installed its Beacon prototype, a 32-node server, to Microsoft Research. Beacon uses the company’s Direct Broadcast Optical Interconnect (DBOI).
[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

Lightfleet Corporation announced today that they’ve placed an alpha version of their optical interconnect technology at Microsoft Research…
…The unit was delivered to Microsoft Research’s eXtreme Computing Group, the team that Dan Reed heads up. A little more in the announcement, and I have an email in to the company to find out details…
[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

Microsoft Research is the first commercial customer of a new optical equipment module made by a seven-year-old startup that hopes its gear will enable servers to send and receive information faster. Lightfleet, based in Camas, Wash. sold an alpha version of its Direct Broadcast Optical Interconnect system, which uses broadcast light to connect computing nodes, to Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group, as part of a project to explore faster communication between servers in its cloud computing deployments…
[ READ FULL ARTICLE ]

Contact:
Kali Bean
Edelman
(503)471-6834
kali.bean@edelman.com

CAMAS, Wash. – April 20, 2010 – Lightfleet Corporation today announced that it has sold and installed its first commercial alpha unit at Microsoft Research. Lightfleet’s Direct Broadcast Optical Interconnect (DBOI) system uses broadcast light to reinvent the way computing nodes are connected in next generation data centers. Lightfleet’s DBOI technology creates a switchless optical fabric that enables all nodes to communicate with all other nodes simultaneously, breaking the performance barriers of today’s typical interconnect architectures. Engineered to meet the growing demands for green computing in an energy-efficient, high density form factor, Lightfleet’s capabilities offer unique parallel computing opportunities that allow for building efficient, high-performance cloud infrastructures that deliver more scalability, power savings and cost savings than ever before.

Delivery of the blade-based system, which uses Lightfleet’s optical interconnect technology and is ported to Windows, represents Lightfleet’s first customer shipment and a critical milestone in the company’s goal to solve distributed computing’s architectural bottleneck. Microsoft Research’s eXtreme Computing Group is exploring the potential of Lightfleet’s optical interconnect in cloud computing workloads. The group’s mission is to develop radical new approaches to computing hardware, and reliable, secure exascale software systems.

Lightfleet’s systems use broadcast light to break the inherent limitations of switched fabrics. The performance combines high throughput, low latency and the node-to-node data arrival skew typical of a shared memory system. This is achieved by utilizing the company’s patented DBOI technology and a shadowed-memory programming model which uniquely combines the benefits of large scale shared memory computing with the benefits of a standard, high volume distributed architecture.

John Peers, Lightfleet CEO, said, “The installation of this system at Microsoft Research is a key step to realizing the full potential of our technology. Lightfleet’s DBOI technology fundamentally changes the way communication among computing systems is achieved and we look forward to working with Microsoft to develop next-generation server and data center architectures that are highly scalable and offer new opportunities for massively parallel, distributed computing.”

As data center complexity increases and energy costs grow, input/output optimization and server consolidation are inevitable. The Lightfleet DBOI is designed to serve evolving cloud computing and virtualization demands. The company has received significant interest from the federal government and from Wall Street retail brokerage and investment management firms, market data firms and exchanges that realize the benefits of the technology ranging from high performance to general purpose computing. More information and a technical white paper are available at www.lightfleet.com.

About Lightfleet Corp.

Lightfleet was founded in 2003 by a team of individuals seeking to deliver simplified solutions in the increasingly complex world of computing. Drawing from diverse backgrounds in optics, signal processing, neural computing, massively parallel processing, and semiconductor design, Lightfleet is uniquely positioned to design faster, cooler, and more compact platforms than have previously existed. By leveraging the properties of light, Lightfleet brings enhanced value to our customers and partners in the form of efficient, flexible, and affordable systems to meet a range of compute needs including transaction processing, data mining, visualization, simulation, and high-throughput, large-scale application processing. Lightfleet’s headquarters are located in Camas, Washington. More information is available at http://www.lightfleet.com. OEMs should contact sales@lightfleet.com, Media should contact media@lightfleet.com.
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A start-up has plans to turn the traditional approach to blade servers on its ear, and it’s not just smoke and mirrors. But it is light and mirrors.

For the past seven years, Lightfleet has been working on a technology that employs light signals to replace the cabling and switches typically used to connect various server nodes in a blade server. And as of December, it had delivered its first unit–to Microsoft’s Research’s labs.

Lightfleet’s first product is code-named Beacon, a 32-node server that uses dual-core Intel processors along with standard off-the-shelf disks, memory, and storage all in a package that stands about 16 inches tall on a server rack (9U in server speak)… [ READ FULL ARTICLE ]