Luxtera Demos 40-Gb OAC

Luxtera Inc. announced today it has sampled a 40-Gb optical active cable (OAC), which it is demonstrating at the International Conference for High Performance Computing (SC07), being held this week in Reno, Nev.

Luxtera will hold three live demonstrations with Mellanox Technologies, QLogic and Fulcrum Microsystems that will showcase InfiniBand protocol at 40 Gb/s quad data rate (QDR) and 10 Gb/s single data rate (SDR) and with high-density 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity.

Luxtera’s CMOS Photonics based interconnect will also be featured at a Disruptive Technologies exhibit at the show. (A disruptive technology is an innovation or product that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology in the market.)

"Luxtera’s Blazar fits the disruptive criteria as the world’s first QSFP (quad small form-factor pluggable) 40 Gb/s OAC and first CMOS photonics product," the company said in a statement. Marek Tlalka, vice president of marketing for Luxtera, said, “Our breakthrough CMOS photonics technology uses a single die for what has traditionally been implemented using multiple components. As a result, Blazar breaks paradigms of traditional optics by delivering a low-cost, long-reach and highly reliable solution that will change the landscape of data centers.”

Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox Technologies, said, “Demonstration of Luxtera’s CMOS photonics-based 40 Gb/s optical active cable is an important milestone for next-generation InfiniBand deployments. Systems with multicore processors and PCIe Gen2 demand this I/O bandwidth for optimal clustered application performance and power efficiency. Higher bandwidths along with larger cluster sizes drive the demand for optical interconnect.”

Luxtera said data centers and high-performance computer (HPC) clusters will gain twice the throughput and time the reach using Blazar versus existing optical active cables. "They will also gain 4x density improvement with one QSFP connector taking the same space as four XFP (10-Gb small form factor pluggable) connectors. "Blazar delivers these improvements at prices comparable to today’s 20 G interconnect," it said.

“QSFP form factor enables higher density and higher connector reliability as well as provides smooth migration from SDR to DDR to QDR rates for the industry,” said Lloyd Dickman, QLogic’s CTO for InfiniBand Products.

The three connectivity demos will take place at Luxtera’s main Booth 384, Mellanox Booth 127, QLogic Booth 261 and Luxtera’s Disruptive Technologies Exhibit in Booth 94.

For more information, visit: http://www.luxtera.com