New hardware technology such as rack-scale computers (RSCs) are redefining the landscape of data center computing today, achieving both higher bandwidth and lower latency. As a basic building block of a redesigned stack of hardware, OS, storage and network, such infrastructure is increasingly suitable for HPC workloads. However, most of today’s data center technology was designed or conceived in the era before the cloud existed. Many of the technologies represent compromises, encumbered by legacy thinking. We are exploring optical technologies across the three primary resources, networking, storage, and compute. 
In this talk, we will outline the future challenges in the data center and discuss the limitations of current technology. We will take a holistic end-to-end view of the needs of the cloud and present our work on optical networking and storage.