So with all the slim pickings of interesting technical news and my personal vendetta against Apple and anything iPhone. I have scrounged around and found out something interesting, that involves Lights, shiny reflective surfaces, and tiny tiny cameras.
Once upon a’ time I wrote an article telling you all about microchips that would communicate with light. This following article follows the same line of thought.
A company by the name of Lightfleet has been working on a project code-named “Beacon” for the past seven years. The project incorporates technology that employs light signals that will eventually replace the cabling and switches used in a blade server to connect different server nodes.
As of this past December a working unit had been delivered to Microsoft’s Research Laboratory. It is a thirty-two node server that utilizes dual-core Intel processors as well as standard ‘off-the-shelf disks’, storage, & memory.
The difference between a normal blade servers compared to the one that Lightfleet delivered to Microsoft is how the each node communicates with one another. Typically the more nodes you put into a blade server the more complex the job of interconnection becomes. This also generates more heat, and how much power that is uses, and will drastically diminish operation speed.
That is not the case with the new approach from Lightfleet. The companies odd interpretation of something that might remind you of a Three Musketeers moto: “All to all, all at once” is the key to how the company gets around the as of now troublesome complexities with operating a blade server.
Instead of having to flip switches and pass individual commands from one server to the next the new method Lightfleet is working on allows the server nodes can transmit the same signal to all of the other nodes. Then each node can receive the signal sent by the nodes transmitters. Now of course Lightfleet isn’t the first to use optics for signal transferring, as fiber optics does take advantage of light moving faster than anything else, but Lightfleet, using mirrors, lights and tiny little cameras seems to be taking a step in the right direction, allowing each node within the server to communicate with all 32 nodes simultaneously .
-TwisT
