The Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) will expand its 2012 program and exhibitor participation to spotlight the growing role of fiber optics technology in datacom, cloud computing and data center networking to meet bandwidth and power challenges. The leading conference for the optical networking industry, to take place March 4–8 in Los Angeles, is managed by the Optical Society. “Our industry is seeing a convergence of computing resources and communications infrastructure, which has resulted in an emerging area of optical communication applications driven by data centers and cloud computing,” said Keren Bergman of Columbia University, chair of the OFC/NFOEC subcommittee on Optical Networking, Technologies and Applications for Datacom and Computercom. “We are bringing together both vendors and systems providers to redirect the efforts toward these emerging applications in order to solve problems related to bandwidth and energy consumption.” The technical conference programming will include a keynote address by Google’s Milo Medin, vice president, Access Services, who will address attendees on “Bandwidth, Optics and the Age of Abundance.” It will also feature workshops, technical paper presentations and panel discussions with industry leaders from Facebook, NEC Systems and Fujitsu, among others. OFC/NFOEC also will host the entire scope of optical communications, providing technical and business programming, exhibits and other activities for all audiences from systems companies to service providers and carriers and equipment manufacturers. Datacom products and services will be well represented by the more than 500 exhibitors, including Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu Network Communications, Google Fiber, Huawei, Infinera, Nokia Siemens and Juniper. Other notable datacom programming includes: • Cloud Computing as a Service — the Service Provider Summit keynote address by Stuart Elby, PhD, vice president, Network Architecture and Technology & chief technologist, Verizon Digital Media Services, Verizon • Lighting Up the Data Center — a panel moderated by Brad Booth, director of network architecture, Office of the CTO, Dell Inc. • Advanced Integrated Photonics — a market watch panel moderated by Ted Schmidt, PhD, director, Optical Systems Technology, Juniper Networks • Optics in the Data Center: How Can We Efficiently Move and Control Large Amounts of Data? — a workshop organized by Odile Liboiron-Ladouceur, McGill University, Canada; Laurent Schares, IBM, USA Notable datacom technical presentations include: • Delivering Scale Out Data Center Networking with Optics – Why and How, Amin Vahdat, Google/UC Davis • Design Principles in the Open Compute Project, Eitan Frachtenberg, Facebook, US • Future Computing Architectures Enabled by Optical and Nanophotonic Interconnects, Moray McLaren, HP, US • Optical Interconnect Opportunities in Supercomputers and High End Computing, Alan Benner, IBM • Optical Networking for Data Centers Across Wide Area Networks, Joe Berthold, Ciena, USA • Optically Interconnected Data Center Networks, Lei Xu, NEC Labs America, USA • Energy Efficiency and Scalability of Multi-plane Optical Interconnection Networks for Computing Platforms and Data Centers, Piero Castoldi, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Studi Universitari e Perfezionamento (SSSUP), Italy • Cost-effective Transceiver Technologies for High-bandwidth Optical Interconnection in High-end Server Systems, Tanaka Kazuhiro, Fujitsu Labs., Ltd., Japan Datacom short courses include: • Datacenter Networking 101, Cedric Lam and Hong Liu, Google, USA • Cloud Computing and Dynamic Networks, George Clapp, Telcordia Technologies, USA; Douglas Freimuth, IBM Research, USA • Computercom Interconnects: Circuits and Equalization Methods for Short Reach Power-Efficient Optical and Electrical Links, Alexander Rylyakov, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA • Data Center Cabling: Transitioning from Copper to Fiber, Lisa Huff; DataCenterStocks.com, USA, Discerning Analytics, LLC, USA The complete OFC/NFOEC schedule is available online. For more information, visit: www.ofcnfoec.org