OpenOptics: Enabling Open Research and Implementation of Optical Data Center Networks#

Yiming Lei, Federico De Marchi (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), Jialong Li (Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology), Raj Joshi (Harvard), Shu-Ting Wang (UC San Diego), Xiaoqi Chen (Purdue), Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran (VU Amsterdam), Yiting Xia (MPI)

• Why: Optical DCNs have been stuck as closed, hardware-tied ecosystems — every research prototype is bespoke. This is the first serious open framework, and it lowers the cost of experimenting with circuit-switched fabrics to "Python script" level. If you track OCS-based DC designs, this is the platform to watch.
• What: An open research/implementation framework that decouples optical DCN software from optical hardware. It implements six optical DCN architectures and seven routing schemes on a real testbed (108 ToRs) and achieves a 2 µs minimum optical circuit duration on commodity devices — a record for circuit-switched DCN granularity.
• How: Three pieces: a time-flow table abstraction as the common hardware/software interface, a unified workflow + Python API for defining optical DCNs, and a backend that re-architects queue management around time-flow tables so packets are staged for rapidly reconfiguring circuits.
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable to researchers and builders experimenting with optical/express-loop fabrics; requires programmable (P4-class) switches plus commodity optical hardware. Artifacts were evaluated and reproduced (available/functional/reproduced badges), so it is genuinely usable, not just described.