The growing adoption of AI, gaming and virtual reality is testing the limits of traditional data center cooling strategies. Rising power densities are boosting interest in liquid cooling, which offers the potential to pack more computing power into a smaller area. Rich Miller and his panel of experts will explore the benefits of different forms of liquid cooling in the data center including ‘indirect liquid cooling’ as well as ‘direct cooling’ also known as ‘immersion cooling’ which is attracting attention because it uses very little water, a key factor in markets facing drought and water scarcity. Join us for this informative session.

The data center is a complex ecosystem, in which data transport, power supply, equipment cooling, pathway support and other systems evolve to optimally serve the compute function. Additionally, a data center can be virtually any shape or size depending on the applications and users it serves. Because of their essential function in human connectivity, data centers can and sometimes do evolve based on cultural and societal shifts. This roundtable discussion explores the essential role of data centers. It takes a close look at what is driving the need for more computing power within these facilities and describes some of the specific changes and innovations taking place within data centers because of this growing need.

With hyperscaler bandwidth requirements expected to reach into the terabits in the not-too-distant future, a variety of innovations will be necessary in data center optics. These will include optical transceivers at 400G and above as well as optical chip-to-chip interconnect and related co-packaged optics advances. Technologies such as photonic integrated circuits enabled via silicon photonics and other photonic integration strategies will play important roles, as will innovation in lasers. This session will focus on high-speed transmission requirements in the data center and the technologies that will help meet them. 

In many data centers, commerce is the primary compute function. In these environments, where network-traffic flow translates to cash flow, every second of downtime means business lost. For these data centers, agility is paramount when upgrading transmission speeds and when expanding the network’s size and scope. This roundtable discussion will provide guidance on defining a roadmap for a data center network. It will include a look at the technologies, systems, and tools enabling the agility that is essential when evolution happens quickly.