22 - 26 September 2013
ICC London ExCeL, UK

Special Symposia

 

Special Symposia 1
Nanophotonics & Metamaterials for Telecoms and Data Processing

View Special Symposia 1

 

Special Symposia 2
Next Generation data centres - Paving the way for the Zettabyte Era

View Special Symposia 2

 

Nanophotonics & Metamaterials for Telecoms and Data Processing

The fields of metamaterials and nanophotonics are closely interlinked. Nanophotonics is now a major research direction in optical physics and engineering. Driven by the dream of unprecedented device functionality, nanophotonics studies the exciting science of the interaction of light with nanostructures, at the size scale where optical, electronic, structural, thermal and mechanical properties become deeply interdependent. The aim is to control light in a minute device containing just a few layers of atoms using signals carried by only a few photons and to do it very rapidly, within just a few oscillation cycles of the light wave. Metamaterials are artificial electromagnetic media achieved by structuring matter on a sub-wavelength scale. This field of research was catalysed a few years ago by the intriguing opportunity to develop media that refract light in the opposite direction to that of normal media. The field of metamaterials is now a major research direction in photonics. Today its meaning encompasses linear, nonlinear, switchable and artificial gain media offering all manner of unusual and useful functionalities, achieved by artificially structuring matter at sizes smaller than the length scale of the external stimulus. Nanophotonics and metamaterials currently represent two of the most dynamic areas of physics, engineering and materials science and have been facilitated by the recent proliferation of nanofabrication techniques such as high-resolution optical and electron beam lithography, focused ion milling and nanoimprinting. With much of the basic physics now properly understood the new challenge is to develop nanophotonic devices and metadevices and to establish practical applications of the technology.  

 

The main purpose of the symposium is to bring together research leaders in the nanophotonics, metamaterials and optical communications communities to foster the exchange of ideas and to identify areas in which these potentially  technologies have the potential to have the greatest impact.

 

Programme:

View symposium 1 programme

 

Presentations:

Active plasmonics in true data traffic applications

Active surface plasmon photonics

Active Terahertz Metamaterials

On-chip photonic crystal light sources

 

Co-Chairs:

  • Nikolay Zheludev (University of Southampton, UK)
  • Nader Engheta (University of Pennslyvania, USA)
  • Harry Atwater (California Institute of Technology, USA)

 

Speakers:

  • Harry Atwater, California Institute of Technology, USA
  • Nikos Pleros, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
  • Pierre Berini, University of Ottawa, Canada
  • Nikolay Zheludev, University of Southampton, UK and NTU Singapore
  • Harald Giessen, University of Stuttgart, Germany
  • Toni Taylor, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA
  • Nader Engheta, University of Pennsylvania, USA
  • Jessie Rosenberg, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Centre, USA
  • Sonia Buckley, Stanford University, USA
  • Frank Koppens, ICFO, Spain
  • Cesare Soci, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Meir Orenstein, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

 


Next Generation data centres - Paving the way for the Zettabyte Era

The global amount of digital information is growing at a staggering pace of 50% p.a. and will exceed 60 Zettabytes in 2020. While storing and processing of such massive data will offer new business opportunities, it will also require new data centre and data centre networking architectures to provide the necessary scalability, resource sharing, and automation. Scalability is achieved by increasing the number of connected servers and storage devices as well as their interface and processing speeds. Warehouse-size data centres can easily host ten thousands of servers with their associated storage. Using multiple geographically dispersed data centres provides redundancy and further scalability. Server and storage virtualization improve the data centre utilization by resource sharing between multiple tenants or applications. Open source or vendor-specific software frameworks allow an automated control of compute and storage resources.


One of the most challenging issues when scaling data centre resources is the attached network infrastructure – inside the data centre, between multiple data centres and between the data centre and the user. A programmatic network control, a flexible allocation of networking functions, and appropriate switching and interface technologies are crucial to facilitate a seamless capacity adaptation and a coordinated orchestration of computing, storage and network resources.


This special symposium provides a forum for service & content providers, system integrators, equipment manufacturers, component suppliers and academia to discuss requirements, challenges and solutions for next-generation data centres. Key results from latest research as well as practical findings from commercial deployments will be presented.


Specifically, the following questions will be addressed:

  • What will be the role of data centres in future service & content provider networks?
  • What network architectures & connectivity is required (intra-DC, inter-DC, user to DC)?
  • Which role will open source software frameworks play? Will there be open northbound interfaces?
  • How can network appliances be virtualized and where will they be allocated?
  • How will next generation data centres look like?
  • How to best trade-off latency, bandwidth, connectivity, cost and power?
  • Which role will optics play inside future datacentres (as well as inter-DC and user to DC)?
  • Which optical interconnect technologies will be used (on-board, intra-rack, inter-rack)?
  • Is there a place for optical switching, and if so is it circuits, bursts, packets?
  • Will Silicon photonics bring a radical paradigm change for the data centre?

 

Format:
3 x 2 hour sessions of invited talks. The third session will include a 30 minute panel discussion.

 

Programme:

View symposium 2 programme

 

Presentations:

Next-Generation Inter- Data Center Networking

Network Unifying Software Defined Transport and Datacenter Networking to deliver Carrier class Cloud Services

Network Technologies for Next-generation Data Centers

Control Plane architectures for Photonic Packet/Circuit Switching-based Large Scale Data Centres

Photonic Interconnect Technologies for Data Center and HPC in the EU Project PhoxTroT

 

Co-Chairs:

  • Juan Pedro Fernandez-Palacios (Telefónica)
  • Harm J. S. Dorren (TU Eindhoven)
  • Jörg-Peter Elbers (ADVA Optical Networking)

 

Speakers:

  • Matthew Finnie, Interoute, United Kingdom
  • Vijay Vusirikala, Google Inc, USA
  • Andy Reid, British Telecom, United Kingdom
  • Dominique Verchere, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
  • Chris Liou, Infinera, USA
  • Salvatore Spadaro, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain
  • John Dunne, Intune Networks, Ireland
  • Bert Jan Offrein, IBM Zurich Labs, Switzerland
  • Peter De Dobbelaere, Luxtera, USA
  • Tolga Tekin, Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Micro Integration (IZM), German
  • Kobi Hasharoni, Compass EOS, Israel




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