Full-day Tutorial: OpenOptics: An Open Research Framework for Optical Data Center Networks

The tutorial will take place at Room Almedina.

• Yiting Xia (Max Planck Institute for Informatics - MPI-INF)
• Yiming Lei (Max Planck Institute for Informatics - MPI-INF)
• Federico De Marchi (Max Planck Institute for Informatics - MPI-INF)

08:45 — 09:00	Registration and Setup
09:00 — 09:20	Lecture 1: OpenOptics Overview
09:20 — 09:50	Lab 1: FIrst Experience with OpenOptics
09:50 — 10:00	Lecture 2: OpenOptics Workflow and Modules
10:00 — 10:30	Lab 2: Setting up Optical Connectivity
10:30 — 11:00	Morning coffee break
11:00 — 11:40	Lab 3: OpenOptics Routing Table (I)
11:40 — 12:10	Lab 4: OpenOptics Routing Table (II)
12:10 — 12:45	Lab 5: Runtime Topology Reconfiguration
12:45 — 14:00	Lunch
14:00 — 14:20	Lecture 3: Research with OpenOptics
14:20 — 14:40	Lecture 4: OpenOptics System Architecture
14:40 — 15:10	Lab 6: OpenOptics Topology APIs
15:10 — 15:45	Lab 7: OpenOptics Routing APIs
15:45 — 16:15	Afternoon coffee break
16:15 — 16:35	Lecture 5: Testbed & Application
16:35 — 17:00	Testbed Demo
17:00 — 18:00	Discussion and Feedback

This full-day tutorial introduces OpenOptics, an open research framework for optical data center networks (DCNs). Through a combination of lectures and hands-on labs, participants will learn to design, experiment with, and extend optical DCNs using OpenOptics Python APIs and monitoring tools.

Optical DCNs are emerging as a promising design for cloud infrastructure, with numerous optical architectures proposed. However, network and system research for optical DCNs is fundamentally constrained by the optical hardware due to: (1) the need for architecture-specific system solutions, (2) the lack of standardized evaluation platforms for cross-system comparison, and (3) the high entry barrier posed by optical domain knowledge for networking and system researchers. We address these problems with OpenOptics, a general framework to facilitate network and system research on optical DCNs. OpenOptics defines a common hardware-software interface, abstracting away optical hardware complexity. Its unified workflow and user-friendly API simplify the implementation of diverse optical DCNs using Python scripts. The backend system supports this common interface and offers rich infrastructure services for various applications. OpenOptics supports operation with both physical devices and Mininet emulation, making it accessible to researchers and students regardless of their equipment availability.

• Morning Session:
  • Overview of optical DCNs and OpenOptics’ design
  • Hands-on labs to build and visualize basic optical networks in Mininet
  • Introduction to topology and routing APIs
• Afternoon Session:
  • Advanced use of APIs for custom topology and routing design
  • Testbed systems and testing upper-layer functionalities
  • TCP performance analysis on optical DCNs

• This tutorial is designed for general audience who are interested in optical DCNs as well as optical researchers.
• Prior knowledge on SDN is recommended but not required.
• Participants should bring their own laptops capable of runing Docker or access provided virtual machines.

Yiting Xia is a Tenure-Track Faculty at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where she leads the network and cloud systems research group. She got her PhD degree in Computer Science from Rice University. Before joining Max Planck Institute, she was a research scientist at Facebook. Her research is to build network infrastructure and software systems for emerging cloud applications. Her works on both future network designs and industry systems have been published on top networking and systems venues. She has served on the technical program committee for SIGCOMM, NSDI, IMC, SOSR, ICNP, HotNets, etc. She won the N2Women rising star award in 2021.

Yiming Lei is a PhD student at the network and cloud systems research group at Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF). His research focuses on leveraging network programmability and domain characteristics to design efficient and scalable networked systems for data centers.

Federico De Marchi is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Max Planck Institute for Informatics in the Network and Cloud Systems group, advised by Prof. Yiting Xia. His main research interests lie in Network Systems, with a strong focus on Data Center Networks.

• Website
• GitHub Repository

[1] Yiming Lei, Federico De Marchi, Jialong Li, Raj Joshi, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, and Yiting Xia. “OpenOptics: An Open Research Framework for Optical Data Center Networks.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.18319, 2024.

[2] Yiming Lei, Federico De Marchi, Raj Joshi, Jialong Li, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, and Yiting Xia. “An Open Research Framework for Optical Data Center Networks.” In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference: Posters and Demos, pages 86–88, 2024.

[3] OpenOptics Website: https://openoptics.mpi-inf.mpg.de

[4] OpenOptics GitHub Repository: https://github.com/mpi-ncs/openoptics