A presentation at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) in San Diego on March 24 will examine the technologies that will emerge in the next three to four years to power warehouse-scale computing data centers, upon which companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, and a number of more are increasingly relying.

The advent of distributed, massive-scale "cloud computing" today is something of a return to the early part of 1980s, when computing was of a different sort. Rather than individual desktop or laptop machines, which are the current norm, computers were commonly time-shared among multiple users working on "dumb" terminals connected to a central machineoften located in some remote corner of the building.

Cloud computing basically makes use of the Internet to connect remote users to massive, warehouse-scale data centers that house large networks of processors and memory for crunching and storing data. These warehouse data centers promise to lower computing costs by sharing resources and taking advantage of economies of scale, says Network Architect Cedric Lam of Google, and they will relieve users of the hassles of maintaining and upgrading equipment and backing up their data.........