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).
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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…
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