Books in 2018

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they have read in 2018. Here, Valery Tolstikhin and Alexandra Wright-Gladstein give their recommendations.

Valery Tolstikhin, president and CEO of Intengent, a consultancy

I read too many technical and business texts during the day so I leave my bedtime for more human reading.  

This year I wasn’t too lucky with fiction books but I did read some great non-fiction ones: Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos and Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. 

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Relentless traffic growth leads to a ROADM rethink

Technology briefing: ROADMs

Lumentum has developed an optical switch to enable reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs) to cope with the traffic growth expected over the next decade. 

The company’s MxN wavelength-selective switch (WSS) will replace the existing multicast switch used in colourless, directionless and contentionless ROADMs. The Lumentum TrueFlex 8x24 twin switch will enable networking nodes of 400-terabit capacity.

“This second-generation switch is what will take us into the 100 gigabaud and super-channel era of network scalability,” says Brandon Collings, CTO of Lumentum.

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Habana Labs unveils its AI processor plans

Start-up Habana Labs has developed a chip architecture that promises to speed up the execution of machine-learning tasks. 

The Israeli start-up came out of secrecy in September to announce two artificial intelligence (AI) processor chips. One, dubbed Gaudi, is designed to tackle the training of large-scale neural networks. The chip will be available in 2019. 

Eitan MedinaGoya, the start-up’s second device, is an inference processor that implements the optimised, trained neural network.

The Goya chip is already in prospective customers’ labs undergoing evaluation, says Eitan Medina, Habana’s chief business officer.

Habana has just raised $75 million in a second round of funding, led by Intel Capital. Overall, the start-up has raised a total of $120 million in funding. 

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Edgecore exploits telecom’s open-networking opportunity

Part 2: Open networking

Edgecore Networks is expanding its open networking portfolio with cell-site gateways and passive optical networking (PON) platforms. 

The company is backing two cell-site gateway designs that aggregate traffic from baseband units for 4G and 5G mobile networks. One design is from the Open Compute Project (OCP) that is available now and the second is from the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) that is planned for 2019 (see table).

Edgecore has also announced PON optical line terminal (OLT) platforms addressing 10-gigabit XGS-PON and GPON.

Source: ADVA, Edgecore Networks

Edgecore is a wholly-ownedsubsidiary of Accton Technology, a Taiwanese original design manufacturer (ODM) employing over 700 networking engineers that reported revenues exceeding $1.2 billion in 2017.

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TIP launches a disaggregated cell-site gateway design

Part 1: TIP white-box designs

Four leading telecom operators, members of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), have developed a disaggregated white-box design for cell sites. The four operators are Orange, Telefonica, TIM Brazil and Vodafone. BT is also believed to be backing the open-design cell-site venture.

 Source: ADVA

The first TIP cell-site gateway product, known as Odyssey-DCSG, is being brought to market by ADVA and Edgecore Networks.

TIP isn’t the only open design framework that is developing cell-site gateways. Edgecore Networks contributed in October a design to the Open Compute Project (OCP) that is based on an AT&T cell-site gateway specification. There are thus two overlapping open networking initiatives developing disaggregated cell-site gateways. 

ADVA and Edgecore will provide the standardised cell-site gateways as operators deploy 5G. The platforms will support either commercial cell-site gateway software or open-source code. 

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Using an open-source model to spur AI adoption

The Linux Foundation’s (LF) Deep Learning Foundation has set itself the ambitious goal of providing companies with all the necessary artificial intelligence (AI) software they will need.

Eyal Felstaine“Everything AI, we want you to take from open source,” says Eyal Felstaine, a member of the LF Deep Learning governing board and also the CTO of Amdocs. “We intend to have the entire [software] stack.”

The Deep Learning Foundation is attracting telecom, large-scale data centre operators and other players. Orange, Ciena, Red Hat, Chinese ride-sharing firm, Didi, and Intel are the latest companies to join the initiative. 

The Deep Learning Foundation’s first project is Acumos, a platform for developers to build, share and deploy AI applications. Two further projects have since been added: Angel and Elastic Deep Learning. 

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Oclaro showcases its pluggable CFP2-DCO at ECOC

Multi-sourcing CFP2-DCO modules, coherent digital signal processor (DSP) partnerships, new laser opportunities and the latest on Lumentum’s acquisition of Oclaro. A conversation with Oclaro’s chief strategy officer, Yves LeMaitre.

Oclaro demonstrated its CFP2 Digital Coherent Optics (CFP2-DCO) pluggable module working with Acacia Communications’ own CFP2-DCO at the recent European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC), held in Rome.

Yves LeMaitreOclaro announced earlier this year that it would use Acacia’s Meru coherent DSP for a CFP2-DCO product.

The company also announced at ECOC the availability of a portfolio of single-mode lasers that operate over an extended temperature range.

“We see two new laser opportunities for us,” says LeMaitre. “The upgrade of the access networks and, concurrently, the deployment of 5G.”

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