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EP-4741900-A1 - OPTICAL INTERCONNECTION CABLE WITH EMBEDDED NETWORK TOPOLOGY

EP4741900A1EP 4741900 A1EP4741900 A1EP 4741900A1EP-4741900-A1

Abstract

An optical cable comprising a plurality of multi-fiber connectors or adapters wherein the connectors or adapters are configured to connect to network equipment in a data communications network and wherein the optical cable is configured to map near end to far end multi-fiber ports following specific network topologies whereby fiber groups are rearranged in a transition zone of the optical cable such that each of all fibers within one subjacketed group at the near end is routed to multiple independent subjacketed groups at the far end, such that a light path of connected transmitters and receivers are matched to provide optical connections from transmitting fibers to receiving fibers.

Inventors

  • CASTRO, JOSE M.
  • SEDOR, THOMAS M.
  • KOSE, BULENT
  • BERRIDGE, BENJAMIN J.
  • HIBNER, MAX W.
  • HUANG, YU
  • KELLY, BRIAN L.
  • REID, ROBERT A.

Assignees

  • Panduit Corp.

Dates

Publication Date
20260513
Application Date
20251031

Claims (7)

  1. An optical cable (200, 400, 500) comprising a plurality of multi-fiber connectors (310) or adapters wherein the connectors or adapters are configured to connect to network equipment in a data communications network and wherein the optical cable is configured to map near end to far end multi-fiber ports following specific network topologies whereby fiber groups are rearranged in a transition zone (220) of the optical cable such that each of all fibers (11, ..., 18) within one subjacketed group (10) at the near end is routed to multiple independent subjacketed groups (110, ..., 180) at the far end, such that a light path of connected transmitters and receivers are matched to provide optical connections from transmitting fibers to receiving fibers.
  2. An optical cable (200, 400, 500) comprising a plurality of Nu subjacketed units (10, ..., 40/80) at a near end of the cable and a plurality of Nu' subjacketed units (110, ..., 180/140) at a far-end of the cable, wherein the units contain Ng fiber groups terminated with optical connectors (310) at the near end, and Ng' fiber groups terminated with optical connectors at the far end, wherein each fiber group has a number of fibers Nf at the near end and a number of fibers Nf' at the far end, wherein a variable structure, located in a transition zone (220) or distributed along the cable, interconnects units from the near end and far end of the cable, interchanging the location of fiber groups among several units, wherein the number of units, fiber groups and fibers follow the relationship Nu x Ng x Nf = Nu' x Ng' x Nf', and at least 75% of the near-end and far-end units share at least one fiber group.
  3. The optical cable of claim 2, wherein each subjacketed unit has a different length to accommodate different distances to communication equipment.
  4. The optical cable of any of claims 2 to 3, further comprising external labels in units and/or fiber groups at the near and far end of the cable to provide interconnection maps of the network to portable devices, wherein the labels are readable by label readers such as laser scanners or cameras of said portable devices, and provide information for installing or maintaining a network.
  5. The optical cable of any of claims 2 to 4, wherein the cable is configured to connect to traditional cables to provide a pre-designed fabric topology without the need to implement the topology in patch panels.
  6. The optical cable system of any of claims 2 to 5, wherein Nf'=Nf.
  7. An optical cable according to claim 1 and according to any of claims 2 to 6.

Description

FIELD The present disclosure relates to data center optical networks and in particular, to methods and apparatus for fast deployment of optical fabrics for hyperscale or Artificial Intelligence (AI) data center networks. BACKGROUND Traditional enterprise and cloud data centers already utilize distributed computing among hundreds to thousands of servers to run customers' applications. However, for those traditional applications, distributed computing is often geared towards improving the availability, reliability, and scalability of enterprise applications such as web services including streaming, social media, file storage, and email servers, among others. Although the requirements of bandwidth and latency are important for traditional applications, they cannot compare with AI Machine Learning (AI/ML) requirements. AI/ML networks necessitate immense bandwidth and low-latency requirements to handle the processing of complex algorithms to understand, learn, and make predictions using massive datasets. State-of-the-art and future systems for training or inference of advanced generative AI/ML models require very high bandwidth interconnections low (tail) latency, and fabric topologies that enable full connectivity among accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, or other accelerators). AI/ML systems use a specialized network, called the back-end network, typically consisting of Infiniband (IB) links, for computing. Ethernet connections are utilized for the front-end (traditional) network. Today, the back-end of most of those AI/ML systems uses a large number of short-distance (multifiber connector/adapter) interconnections. Typically, topologies used in AI/ML networks are Spine/Leaf or rail-optimized fabrics to interconnect the nodes to switches or for switch-to-switch interconnections. Other topologies, used for traditional HPC such as Torus, Hypercube, Dragonfly, and Slim Fly among others, are being investigated. The high capital and operational cost of state-of-the-art AI/ML systems require reducing the deployment time of dense and highly reliable optical channels. This is challenging, using current infrastructure deployment methods. In this document, we disclose a novel type of optical fiber cable with an embedded interconnection structure that reduces the need for patch panels, and the number of mating interfaces to implement a desired network topology. SUMMARY An optical cable comprising a plurality of Nu subjacketed units at a near end of the cable and a plurality of Nu' subjacketed units at a far-end of the cable, wherein the units contain Ng fiber groups terminated with optical connectors at the near end, and Ng' fiber groups terminated with optical connectors at the far end, wherein each fiber group has a number of fibers Nf at the near end and a number of fibers Nf' at the far end, wherein a variable structure, located in a transition zone or distributed along the cable, interconnects units from the near end and far end of the cable, interchanging the location of fiber groups among several units, wherein the number of units, fiber groups and fibers follow the relationship Nu x Ng x Nf = Nu' x Ng' x Nf', and at least 75% of the near-end and far-end units share at least one fiber group, such that the variable interconnections follows design that intends to incorporate a desired optical fabric topology that simplifies the network deployment and reduce losses. In some implementations, Nf'=Nf. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS Fig. 1A shows a traditional breakout/sub-unitized cable cross-section viewed from one side, the near end of the cable.Fig. 1B shows a traditional breakout/sub-unitized cable cross-section viewed from the far end of the cable.Fig. 1C shows the cross-section viewed from the near end of the cable of CableMesh 200.Fig. 1D shows the cross-section viewed from the far end of the cable of CableMesh 200.Fig. 2A shows a representation of optical cables in a 2D coordinate system where the horizontal axis includes the near-end units' labels and the vertical axis includes the far-end units' labels where a traditional breakout cable only connects one unit from the near to the far end using 8 fiber groups in this exampleFig. 2B shows a representation of optical cables in a 2D coordinate system where the horizontal axis includes the near-end units' labels and the vertical axis includes the far-end units' labels where CableMesh connects all units from the near end to all units of the far end, using one fiber group (label shown in the figure) maximizing interconnection metric, M.Fig. 3 shows CableMesh 200 with near end and far end configuration shown in Figs. 1A-1D and Table 1.Fig. 4A shows a Network topology for 8 Leaf and 4 Spine switches.Fig. 4B shows partial implementation with a CableMesh 200 (shown in Figs. 1A-1D and Figs. 2A and 2B).Fig. 5A shows a cross-section of CableMesh, embodiment 400 at the near end of the cable.Fig. 5B shows a cross-section of CableMesh at the far end of the cable.Fig. 5C shows the phy