PCIe-based network architectures over optical fiber links: An insight from the advent project

PCI Express based innovative architectures designed for datacentre connections are proposed exploiting fiber communications for remote very high-speed connectivity. According with the ADVENT project approach a disruptive scenario based on an unique PCIe fabric is described, assuring convergent, storage/analytics functionalities mapped to a global shared memory. In particular, the hardware configuration of this kind of the proposed architecture is presented for inter-host remote communications, showing the intrinsic advantages in terms of connectivity and applications. Moreover, experimentation of PCIe Gen3 interconnections over up to 2-km standard fiber is demonstrated strictly compliant with the standard.