Flow-centric computing leveraged by photonic circuit switching for the post-moore era

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based big data analysis is emerging for broad application fields, including manufacturing, autonomous car, health care, agriculture, and so on. Data centers are under severe pressure to meet ever-increasing demands on clouds. On the other hand, the amount of data processing is bounded by the total power budget, where the reasonable number is up to 20 MW. Therefore, the energy efficiency becomes a critical issue both now and the future. A combination of special-purpose processing units communicating through huge bandwidth optical circuit switched network allows to dramatically improve the energy efficiency of big data processing. Based on this idea, we propose flow-centric computing, a software-defined data center architecture focusing on data flow processing. Compute, storage, and network resources are disaggregated and dynamically composes slices, i.e., data processing environments, based on workload-specific demands. We are conducting a feasibility study of the concept and developing system software technologies.