Major data centres and supercomputers will soon be more cost and energy efficient, and at the same time will be even more powerful. Fraunhofer scientists and 17 partners from business and research in the European Union have set themselves this ambitious goal in the "PhoxTroT" project. The key is optical data transmission. Over the next four years, the project partners will be studying synergies between existing solutions as well as developing new technologies and strategies. Optical data transmission only needs a fraction of the processes that prior systems require. Gigantic data centres of cloud providers consume energy at an extraordinary rate. For example, Google's server farms process many petabytes of data and they consume 260 million watts, enough power for a city of 200,000 households. The need to save energy is equally powerful. These facts led the European Union to initiate the PhoxTroT project, coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM in Berlin. The goal is to cut the energy consumption by at least 50 per cent, while simultaneously doubling the capacity of data connections to 2 terabits per second (Tb/s). This would also significantly reduce costs. Data transmission using light consumes only a fraction of the energy that conventional methods need. The technologies for photonic transmission already exist and have been thoroughly researched. "The novelty of the PhoxTroT project is that we are now researching the synergies between the various technology components and are combining them with each other in a new research plan based on the "mix-and-match" principle," explains project coordinator Dr Tolga Tekin from IZM.
