Project Iris

Project Iris explores novel designs of regional and Wide Area (WAN) cloud networks from the ground-up motivated by the rapid growth of cloud network traffic across data centers.

Project Iris WAN and Metro DCI lab

Building upon recent advancements in optical technologies, we focus on investigating network architectures that are amenable to a distributed data center model and on designing the optical elements that can efficiently support and scale such architectures. These include both new hardware and data plane mechanisms such as building the next-generation transceivers and new switching and reconfiguration technologies, as well as re-defining the control and management planes and capacity planning based on software defined principles.

Project Iris seeks to innovate across the whole cloud stack by co-designing the cloud’s software and hardware infrastructure through a cross-disciplinary team with expertise across systems, networking, optics (system, sub-system and device-level), and hardware. In Project Iris, we concentrate on the regional and WAN infrastructure; we are also developing optical network technologies for the network within the data center (Project Sirius).

Project Iris is part of the broader Optics for the Cloud project, which explores the future of cloud infrastructure at the intersection of optics and computer science.