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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