Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast!
Every week, we discuss something new and interesting from emerging digital technologies, hoping to inspire our listeners to learn something new and advance in their careers. Every week we also receive all your amazing feedback and suggestions that drive us to keep going, bringing you one more interesting episode after another. So, thank you to all our awesome listeners all over the world.
In today’s episode, we talk about a major infrastructure innovation called the Hollow Core Fiber. As technology evolves, it requires the infrastructure supporting it to evolve as well, to keep up with the demands of the change. In this AI era, large scale computing is becoming an everyday thing and it is impossible to carry this out without strong, resilient, and foolproof infrastructure to support it. This is what could be called ‘Purpose-Built Infrastructure’. This can’t happen by just picking up a bunch of hardware and dumping it at a data center somewhere in the world, can it? That’s not how scientific breakthroughs and innovations really happen, do they?
At the Microsoft Ignite event in November 2023, a very revolutionary technology came to everyone’s attention. This tech was called the hollow core fiber. It is an innovative optical fiber that can revolutionize global cloud infrastructure by not just offering superior quality but also improved latency and a more secure data transmission.
The hollow core fiber technology or HCF uses a proprietary design where light propagates in the air core of a hollow fiber. The cores of traditional fibers are made of optical glass, hence the name optical glass fiber or optical fiber. The HCF offers advantages over this traditional optical fiber.
But how do you prevent light leakage in a hollow core fiber and how do you ensure that the light keeps moving ahead in a straight path?
Well, the structure of the hollow core fiber has nested tubes that help reduce any unwanted light leakage and that also ensures that the light keeps moving ahead in a straight path through the hollow core.
If you go back to your high school physics class, you will remember that light travels faster through air than through glass. This helps the hollow core fiber to be about 47% faster than the standard silica glass. This, in turn, leads to much faster speeds and much lower latency when using the HCF. The HCF would also offer much higher bandwidth per fiber.
At this point, it is important to quickly dwell into what is the difference between speed, latency, and bandwidth. They are three different terms, but what do they really mean?
Speed, in this context, stands for how quickly data travels over the medium – the fiber.
Network latency is the amount of time it would take for data to travel between point A to point B across the fiber network. Of course, lower the network latency, faster the response time.
Coming to the concept of bandwidth, bandwidth is the amount of data that gets sent and received in the network.
For so many decades now, there have been dedicated and steady efforts to improve the fiber optic network, to improve the silica fiber technology. Despite such humongous efforts, the progress has been slow and the gains rather modest, especially because of the limitations of silica loss. Comparatively, in early 2024, the HCF technology achieved the lowest optical fiber loss or attenuation ever recorded at a 1550 nm wavelength. This is even lower than what could be offered by the best of pure silica core single mode fiber. Additionally, the hollow core fiber also offered higher launch power handling, a broader spectral bandwidth, and improved signal integrity as well as data security, compared to the silica core single mode fiber.
But why is there a need for higher speed, lower latency, and more bandwidth? We seem to be doing just fine with the fibers we have right now, no?
Well, imagine you are playing Genshin Impact, you need to make some split second decisions and have some quick reaction times. To enable this, you need better speed, lower latency, and better bandwidth. If either of this doesn’t deliver, you’ll lose the game, and that’s no fun, is it? Similarly, when complex AI models are processing data, they need low latency and high speed, otherwise they won’t be able to process the data smoothly, affecting their decision-making capability.
With increasing AI workloads, the hollow core fibers offer significant support and enablement. AI workloads involve processing large amounts of data using machine learning algorithms and neural networks. This could involve tasks like image recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, speech synthesis, etc. These tasks would require fast networking and low latency as they would usually be made of multiple smaller steps of high-power needing data processing tasks like data ingestion, preprocessing, training, inference, evaluation, etc. These tasks involve sending and receiving data from different sources in a distributed system. How quickly and how accurately this gets done would be highly dependent on the reliability of the network. Slow and unreliable networks would lead to delays, errors, and failures which could be very detrimental for the AI workloads. It could lead to poor performance, wasted resources, inaccurate outcomes, etc. Considering the amount of processing power and resources that go into handling the sophisticated AI workloads, such losses are highly undesirable and would throw a spanner in AI innovation.
However, with hollow core fibers, this problem can be solved. HCF can seamlessly support AI workloads that need real-time to near real-time responses like autonomous vehicles, video streaming, online gaming, smart devices, etc. For instance, when you are in an autonomous car, a delay or lag in decision-making can make things go very wrong, leading to accidents, compromising passenger safety. With HCF, this possibility due to lag times is almost eliminated.
The hollow core fiber technology was developed to improve Microsoft Azure’s global connectivity and meet the demands of AI and future workloads. It would offer many advantages to users like higher bandwidth, improved signal integrity, and increased security.
As AI evolves and progresses, the need for strong infrastructure to support it would be critical. The hollow core fiber would be a huge leap forward in supporting complex AI workloads and supporting future innovations in the space. Currently, Microsoft Azure is giving AWS tough competition when it comes to developing AI solutions and machine learning models. With the HCF, Microsoft Azure becomes an even more attractive option for developers. It would, undoubtedly, enable more efficient processing, faster data transfer, and eventually, more powerful & responsive AI applications.
How things will turn out, only time will tell.
With that, we come to the end of this week’s of the Cognixia podcast. We will be back again next week with another interesting and exciting new episode.
Until next week then, happy learning!
