Silicon Photonic Chip Commercial Switch PhotonSwitch Deployed at AWS: Data Center Internal Communication Latency Drops to Picosecond Level
AWS announces deployment of PhotonSwitch silicon photonic switches at its Virginia data center, replacing electrical signals with optical signals for rack-to-rack communication, reducing latency to picosecond levels.
Amazon Web Services announced on July 19 the deployment of PhotonSwitch silicon photonic switches at its Northern Virginia data center cluster, marking the first large-scale adoption of silicon photonics technology for rack-to-rack communication in hyperscale data centers. PhotonSwitch was jointly developed by AWS's in-house team and Intel's silicon photonics division, integrating lasers, modulators, and photodetectors onto silicon-based chips to reduce rack-to-rack communication latency from nanoseconds to picoseconds (approximately 50 picoseconds) while cutting energy consumption by about 60 percent.
AWS infrastructure vice president Peter DeSantis stated: "When AI training clusters require thousands of GPUs to work in concert, communication latency is the performance bottleneck. PhotonSwitch increases GPU-to-GPU communication bandwidth to 3.2 terabits per second, improving trillion-parameter model training efficiency by approximately 35 percent."
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