UC Santa Barbara

We review the motivation, goals, and achievements of the Photonic Integrated Networked Energy efficient datacenter (PINE) project, which is part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) ENergy-efficient Light-wave Integrated Technology Enabling Networks that Enhance Dataprocessing (ENLITENED) program. The PINE program leverages the unique features of photonic technologies to enable alternative mega-datacenters and high-performance computing (HPC) system architectures that deliver more substantial energy efficiency improvements than can be achieved through link energy efficiency alone. In phase 1 of the program, the PINE system architecture demonstrated an average factor of 2.2 ×2.2× improvement in transactions/joule across a diverse set of HPC and datacenter applications. In phase 2, PINE will demonstrate an aggressive 1.0 pJ/bit total link budget with high-bandwidth-density dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) links to enable additional 2.5 ×2.5× or more efficiency gains through deep resource disaggregation.