Collaboration Team by NCTU and Delta Electronics Inc. (Picture provided by NCTU)

An industry-academic collaboration team, formed by Prof. Maria C. Yuang from Department of Computer Science, NCTU, Prof. Po-Lung Tien from Electrical and Computer Engineering, NCTU and Delta Electronics Inc., receives an invitation to IEEE/OSA Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) and Open Compute Project (OCP) for presenting the world''s first auto-controlled optical-tunnel-network system for edge-datacenters: OPTUNS. This system impresses many global IT industries, which express high interest in collaboration with the team.

Yuang and Tien have been working on optical communication networks for almost two decades since 2000 when optical communication was blooming. Going through many ups and downs on the internet and even the dot‑com bubble, they stick to their research, including the wide-area optical network and Passive Optical Network (PON). Five years ago, they revisited the deficiency in the traditional communication system and applied the optical communication technology to the core devices in the datacenter for cloud computing. Their research impressed Delta Electronics Inc. in 2017, who donated billions-dollar-value devices for the research team to build an edge datacenter with four hundred servers. Moreover, they assigned professional software/hardware engineering teams to support the research and closely collaborate with the team in NCTU.

In 4G, the cloud datacenters are too far from the users, failing to provide real-time services. However, in the era of 5G, moving the cloud-computing devices to the edge is a trend. As the edge data center gets closer to the users and end devices, the computing response becomes faster. The team in NCTU spends two years integrating optical and electrical software/hardware for the prototype system, which has far higher performance than any existing system in the academic or commercial market.

According to Yuang, the team breaks the limits that optical switching has slow responses, low flexibility, and limited usable wavelength. They design a novel internet structure and system that vertically integrates optical, electrical software/hardware with AI control technologies. Without those limits, the system becomes the first one in the world designed for datacenter and has been successfully implemented. Those physical limits of optical components are not the only reason other research units cannot implement the system. Also, the ability to vertically integrate cross-domain technologies is the primary reason.

According to Tien, edge datacenter will be massively deployed in smart cities and smart factories in the future. Applying OPTUNS in the edge computing in 5G can reduce more than 80% power consumption compared to traditional electrical switching systems. Moreover, the response time is 100 times less, facilitating the implementation of self-driving cars, unmanned vehicles, and the application of AR/VR. The mass production of the system will be tested within a year and will be sold to telecom providers and services providers who provide edge computing.

NCTU edge datacenter has four hundred servers. The research team spends years to implement the first one with smart control. (Picture provided by NCTU)

OFC demonstrating the system made by NCTU and Delta Electrons Inc. (Picture provided by NCTU)