Optical circuit switches serve the role of programmable patch panels that can physically change the connectivity of optical fibers.
Google is notable for incorporating OCS into its TPUv4 pod architecture.
Google’s OCS uses MEMS mirrors to cross-connect pairs of optical links.1
Footnotes
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Zu et al. “Resiliency at scale: managing Google’s TPUv4 machine learning supercomputer.” NSDI’24. nsdi24-zu.pdf ↩