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…
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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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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 ]