The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has selected Luxtera’s award-winning 40G Active Optical Cable (AOC), Blazar, to interconnect its multi-room data center. Spanning the distance from one to 4,000 meters, Blazar provides the required extended reach to interconnect supercomputing systems and data storage in a campus environment across multiple rooms and floors. Blazar offers reliable, high performance connectivity at low costs and provides NOAA with interconnects needed to compute environmental simulation models as well as predict short-term weather and climate forecasts.

“Luxtera has proven itself and its products to be worthy of NOAA’s specialized requirements at a lower price than competing vendors,” said Craig Tierney, HPC leader for NOAA. “During the installation process, Luxtera was able to quickly surpass any length and spacing challenges previously associated with working between our various floors.  They delivered the high performance necessary to assist computing systems in weather forecasting as well as maximize our data center layout to guarantee network longevity.”

Blazar harnesses the benefits of Silicon Photonics technology by combining nanophotonic elements with conventional CMOS circuits on a single, monolithic die. Delivering the performance of fiber optics at a much lower cost and longer reach than traditional multimode fiber VCSEL interconnects, Blazar provides NOAA with point-to-point connectivity in its data centers at data rates of 40Gbps and beyond. Blazar also offers the ruggedness and reliability associated with copper solutions while breaking reach limitations to fulfill NOAA’s demand for long reach and high bandwidth connectivity.

“NOAA required a solution that could efficiently connect its computing systems across multiple rooms and floors. Blazar’s long reach capability meets these requirements and provides NOAA with data center design flexibility at a low cost,” said Marek Tlalka, vice president of marketing for Luxtera. “Blazar enables NOAA to overcome facility constraints to deploy accurate weather forecasting software used for critical weather predictions like hurricanes, through a reliable, high speed network.”

Recently selected as a Top 50 Most Innovative Company by Technology Review, this new relationship underscores Luxtera’s ability to provide low cost, optical interconnect solutions to the high performance computing market.

Luxtera will showcase Blazar at the OpenFabrics Sonoma Workshop, taking place at The Lodge at Sonoma, on Monday, March 15 from 1:30 p.m.-7:00 p.m. The company will also take part in the panel discussion “Cables and Connectors at Higher Gigs: IB and Ethernet Roadmaps” on Monday, March 15 from 5:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m.