In October, IOWN Global Forum held "FUTURES Taipei 2024" public event in Taiwan. The forum, which promotes the next-generation optical communication infrastructure IOWN, is nearing the five-year mark since its establishment in January 2020. Various research results were presented at the event held in Taipei after NTT and Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan's largest telecommunications company, opened the world's first international APN (All-Photonics Network) in August. This is a report by Waichi Sekiguchi, President and Representative Director of MM Research Institute, Ltd., who covered the event on-site.

"FUTURES" is a public event organized during the IOWN Global Forum's general meeting, in conjunction with the 7th general meeting in Taipei in October. This is the second time the event has been held, following Vancouver, Canada.
　About 160 companies and organizations are members of the IOWN Global Forum, and about 370 people from about 20 countries attended the general meeting held in Taipei, while about 180 people from outside attended the FUTURES.

Katsuhiko Kawazoe, President and Chairperson, IOWN Global Forum

The meeting began with a welcome by Katsuhiko Kawazoe, Representative Member of the Board and Senior Executive Vice President of NTT Corporation, who serves as the chairperson of the forum, followed by a keynote speech from Yennun Huang, Minister of Ministry of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, who was invited as a guest. "Although Taipei City and Tokyo are about 3000 km apart, APN successfully transmitted data with a delay of only 17 msec," Kawazoe said. "Taiwan is committed to its digital strategy, and cooperation through IOWN will greatly contribute to that," Huang said.
　Rong-Ruey Lee, Vice President of Telecom Laboratories at Chunghwa Telecommunication Co., Ltd, who has been instrumental to the international APN connection, gave a lecture titled " Status of Cooperation and Activities for Realizing the IOWN Initiative." Lee pointed out that "data capacity is increasing dramatically due to the emergence of generative AI," and expressed his hope that IOWN can be used to realize RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) over APN, which directly transfers data between memories of different computers. This would allow different cloud platforms to operate together internationally.

Yennun Huang, Minister of the Ministry of Digital Affairs of Taiwan

Rong-Ruey Lee, Vice President, Telecom Laboratories, Chunghwa Telecom

At the "FUTURES" session, Katsutoshi Itoh, Use Case Working Group Chair, IOWN Global Forum & Head of Wireless Technology, Lund Research & Technology Center, Sony Corporation, and Masahisa Kawashima, Technology Working Group Chair, IOWN Global Forum & IOWN Technology Director, NTT Corporation, took the stage. The two working groups are responsible for developing technology to support IOWN and demonstrating the use cases to implement it, which is a crucial role.
　"When the Forum was established in 2020, it set a target of implementation in 2030, but it is now clear that some of the goals can be implemented between 2025 and 2026," said Itoh, chair of the Use Case Working Group, citing three specific use cases. The first is the decentralization of data centers in financial systems, the second is remote broadcast content production, and the third is the decentralization of data centers using GPUs (image processing semiconductors), which are necessary for the use of generative AI.
　In the financial sector, demand for data centers in urban areas is growing, but land acquisition costs and energy efficiency are making it difficult to build new data centers. By decentralizing the data centers to rural areas and connecting them by IOWN APNs, the data centers can operate as if the facilities were in urban areas.
　To produce broadcast programs, such as sports and live events, it has been necessary to dispatch an outside broadcasting vehicle equipped with editing equipment to the site and to provide microwave and satellite links to broadcast stations. By using APN, it is possible to send videos directly to broadcasters and edit them, or to remotely control local cameras. It is also possible to consolidate editing equipment from affiliated stations into key stations and share editing functions. The rapid proliferation of generative AI has increased the demand for data centers with GPU servers, but the burden on the environment has become a major challenge due to the large amount of electricity consumed. With APNs, GPU data centers can be shared remotely, and facilities can be moved to sparsely populated suburbs. The working group calls this "Green Data Center" and is working on various issues to realize it.
　Representatives of the member companies involved in the development of IOWN explained the three use cases that they believe can be implemented by 2025 in the form of a panel discussion. The panelists included Mitsubishi UFJ Bank on the decentralized financial data center, TBSTV and Sony on the remote broadcasting content, and engineers from NetApp on the construction of green data centers, including the shared use of GPUs, and they presented a vision of new business models utilizing IOWN.

Kawashima said that the goal is not to establish a proof of concept, but to establish a radio access network (RAN) that combines wireless and optical technologies, to develop an optical transmission system (ROADM) that transcends the boundaries of telecommunications companies, and to establish a mobile fronthaul over APN that connects wireless base stations. RDMA over APN, which allows data to be transferred directly between the memory of different computers, could allow surveillance footage to be analyzed at a distance, or data centers could be set up in rural areas with virtualized servers that consume significantly less power, he said.
　Tau Leng, Senior Vice President, Technology, Super Micro Computer, Inc., a leading US computer designer and manufacturer that joined the Forum three months ago, spoke on the topic, pointing out that power demand for data centers will more than triple between 2020 and 2030. As they are focused on water-cooling technology, he praised IOWN, which does not generate heat to begin with, as an important technology that will support the AI era.

Masahisa Kawashima, Technology Working Group Chair

Taiwan is home to many IT-related companies, including PC makers and contract semiconductor manufacturers. Chunghwa Telecom aims to halve carbon emissions and power its data centers with 100% renewable energy by 2030, while expanding its data centers to meet massive data demand.
　In addition, Taiwan is facing challenges such as large-scale earthquakes and is building manufacturing plants in Japan and the United States to decentralize manufacturing bases. In an individual interview, Chih-Hsiung Huang, Senior Executive Vice President and CTO of Chunghwa Telecom said, "In the event of a large-scale earthquake, it is important to jointly operate data centers that cross national borders." He emphasized the importance of cooperation with NTT and IOWN Global Forum, as well as expectations for IOWN in terms of both environmental and safety measures.
　About two years before the IOWN Global Forum was established, I had heard about Photonics-Electronics Convergence Technology, which is the core of the IOWN concept, but at that time it was hard to believe that not only communications but also arithmetic processing could be done with optical technology. However, I felt that it was a great achievement to gather leading researchers and engineers from all over the world in the form of an international forum and lead to the presentation of specific use cases. IOWN is the first Japanese technology in a long time, and we hope it will take off in 2025.

What is the IOWN concept?
https://group.ntt/en/group/iown/

What is the IOWN Global Forum?
https://group.ntt/en/group/iown/outreach.html