Welcome to the Optical Interconnects Conference 2018 at the Hilton Santa Fe Historic Plaza, Santa Fe, New Mexico!

The seventh IEEE Photonics Society Optical Interconnects Conference, whose roots trace back to the original 1990 Workshop on Interconnections within High Speed Digital Systems, seeks to facilitate the collaboration required to drive new interconnect architectures and technologies from concepts in research labs to commercial realities. The conference covers the complete spectrum of high performance interconnect challenges in network systems, architectures, applications, subsystems, and devices. The crucial role that any interconnect strategy plays can only be fully realized when optimized at the system level. This is particularly so in large future peta- and exa-scale platforms in datacenters and supercomputers. So we look forward to the participation of system architects, programmers and everyone researching the interconnect role in a more self-aware next generation platform. With the launch of the US Integrated Photonics Institute for Manufacturing Innovation, we are particularly interested in exploring how new developments in integrated photonics will impact optical interconnects and next generation systems.

Hot topics tackled this year include:

• the pros & cons of on-board optics in datacenter hardware
• how will the urgent need for 100Gb/s will be met in backplanes and chip-to-chip

The interconnect strategy is crucial in peta- and exa-scale platforms in datacenters and supercomputers. So we look forward to the participation of hardware technologists, network and system architects of peta- and exa-scale platforms in datacenters and supercomputers. We also welcome software application architects, to discuss how physical connectivity relates to application workload distribution.