News and Awards
Columbia University & GENI: Embedding Real-time Substrate Measurements for Cross-layer Communications (ERM)
Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) News
Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) Front Page
Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering News & Events
The GENI ERM team at Columbia University, led by Prof. Keren Bergman, Director of the Lightwave Research Laboratory, is creating innovative cross-layer measurement capabilities that will help free GENI researchers from the constraints of today’s strictly layered Internet architecture.
By providing deeper exposure to physical layer measurement and protocol information, the ERM team will help enable GENI researchers to realize well instrumented experiments supporting new network architectures that cut across today’s protocol layers. 
The ERM team has developed initial specifications for cross-layer communications that will allow bi-directional information exchange between protocol layers and enable holistic optimization of the network stack from optical network substrates all the way up to the application, and are now working with other GENI prototyping projects to integrate their design into the overall GENI control and measurement framework.
To enable this top-to-bottom communication, the ERM team is developing GENI-compatible, real-time embedded measurement capabilities; enabling deeper exposure and transparency to network substrates for cross-layer information exchange and user access; and integrating their prototypes with GENI’s ORCA control plane to dynamically monitor optical substrate performance and allow for cross-layer control and management decisions based on the optical layer configuration and performance.
Prof. Bergman’s team has already achieved several important milestones. The team first evaluated the GENI system design’s capabilities to embed real-time measurements and assessed requirements for real-time user access to data measurements across a diverse set of heterogeneous technologies. Then they developed two sets of specifications; one for supporting real-time measurements within the network substrate and another for network protocols that access cross-layer measurements. They have also developed models using the ns-2 simulator to quantify the performance improvements that their techniques enable. Finally, the team has proposed a Unified Measurement Framework (UMF) that includes well-defined interfaces between the GENI control plane and measurement devices.
Now the ERM team is collaborating with the GENI prototype projects at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Duke University, and the University of Houston for potential integration of their real-time measurement system into the ORCA-BEN control framework. Before the end of the year, the ERM team expects to contribute an experimental use case to GENI working groups to further validate the proposed cross-layer communications schemes.
GENI Mission & Vision
Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI)
The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a unique virtual laboratory for at-scale networking experimentation where the brightest minds unite to envision and create new possibilities of future internets. The GENI mission is to:
open the way for transformative research at the frontiers of network science and engineering; and
inspire and accelerate the potential for groundbreaking innovations of significant socio-economic impact.
About the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI)
Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI)
GENI, a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale, creates major opportunities to understand, innovate and transform global networks and their interactions with society. Dynamic and adaptive, GENI opens up new areas of research at the frontiers of network science and engineering, and increases the opportunity for significant socio-economic impact. GENI will:
support at-scale experimentation on shared, heterogeneous, highly instrumented infrastructure;
enable deep programmability throughout the network, promoting innovations in network science, security, technologies, services and applications; and
provide collaborative and exploratory environments for academia, industry and the public to catalyze groundbreaking discoveries and innovation.
Professor Keren Bergman Chairs Major Conference
The Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science of Columbia University News
Electrical Engineering Professor Keren Bergman will chair a national conference that for the first time will be hosted outside California’s Silicon Valley.
The Hot Interconnects conference will be held in Lower Manhattan Aug. 25-27. Bergman said there is a good rationale for the move to Wall Street after spending its first 16 years on the Stanford University campus.
"The main reason is that the technology we cover at this conference related to high-performance networking is becoming extremely relevant to Wall Street," she says. "In fact, our conference is going to be hosted by Credit Suisse – attracting many of the top Wall Street technologists and traders. The key topic is related to high-frequency trading."
A preview of the conference was recently published on the EE Times Web site. The New York Times explored high-frequency trading in the July 23 story "Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds."
"This is becoming a big topic," Bergman says, "from technology, finance, and political aspects."
She describes Hot Interconnects as "the premier international forum for researchers and developers of state-of-the-art hardware and software architectures and implementations for interconnection networks of all scales, ranging from on-chip interconnects to wide-area networks." Leaders from industry, academia, and government laboratories will be attending the conference to interact with individuals at the forefront of these fields.
Professor Keren Bergman, Editor of the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN)
Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN)
OSA and IEEE are pleased to announce a copublishing partnership that merges JON with ComSoc's Supplement on Optical Networking and Communications, which is published with the Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. The new journal is called the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN) ISSN: 1943-0620 and is accessible through OSA's Optics InfoBase as well as IEEE Xplore and ComSoc's Digital Library, thus providing expanded exposure for JOCN authors.
Professor Keren Bergman, Chair of the 2009 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) Subcommittee on Micro- and Nano- Photonics Devices
About CLEO/IQEC: Global Premier Event
The Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and The International Quantum Electronics Conference (IQEC) is the premier forum for scientific and technical optics in the world today. The 5-day event features high-quality, cutting-edge optics and photonics programming, tutorials, special symposia, Short Courses and a full program of networking and social events. PhotonXpo—The Exhibit at CLEO, also debuting this year, will feature 350 participating companies showcasing every facet of the optics and photonics industry.
Optical Fiber Communication Conference Features Breakthroughs in Next-Generation Ethernet, Metamaterials, Optical Data Processing and More
New Routers Marry Light and Silicon to Cut Down on Power and Ramp Up Speed
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) EurekAlert! Press Release
Tomorrow's ultra-fast broadband may be limited not by the speed at which data can be sent, but by the electrical power needed to route data to millions of users. 
A new technology that weds light and silicon hopes to keep up the massive connectivity of a faster Internet by cutting down on its power consumption.
To send a single stream of data to many computers, networks have to "multicast," sending out multiple copies of a single input signal carried by an optical fiber. With electronic switching, this requires converting optical data into digital electronic data, making copies in the electronic domain, and converting electronic copies back into optical data. The amount of power that electronic multicasters require to do this is large and will increase exponentially as the speed of data transmission goes up, an energy bottleneck for the industry.
To solve this problem, a team of researchers at Columbia University and Cornell University has built a purely optical device that cuts out the energy-hungry electronic middleman. They use a pulsing laser to clone the light coming in from an optical fiber into eight identical waves going out, a process called "four-wave mixing." This all happens in silicon – one of the most efficient materials for this process – directly embedded on a computer chip. So though the multicasting itself doesn't require electronics, other electronic components, like switches, could be installed on the chip to modify the signal as it passes through.
The device can handle speeds of more than 160G and draws several orders of magnitude less power than current electronic devices. "We're looking ahead to next-generation networks that will run at terabits per second," says Keren Bergman of Columbia University. "You just can't do that kind of multicasting in electronics."
This press release is in reference to Aleksandr Biberman's OFC conference talk "First Demonstration of On-Chip Wavelength Multicasting".
2009 Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition
Aleksandr Biberman and Benjamin Lee have both been selected as semi-finalists in the 2009 Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition for their submissions to the Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) conference entitled "First Demonstration of On-Chip Wavelength Multicasting" and "Multi-Wavelength Message Routing in a Non-Blocking Four-Port Bidirectional Switch Fabric for Silicon Photonic Networks-on-Chip", respectively.
The Corning Outstanding Student Paper Competition recognizes innovation, research excellence and presentation abilities skills in optical communications. The award is endowed by a grant from Corning and administered by the OSA Foundation.
EE’s Keren Bergman Receives Honors
The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science of Columbia University
Professor Keren Bergman of the Department of Electrical Engineering has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology. She received this honor, one of the Institute's most prestigious, for her contributions to development of optical interconnection and transport networks.
In addition, Berman was named a recipient of the 2008 IBM Faculty Award for her research on nanophotonic networks-on-chip. The IBM Faculty Awards program is a competitive, worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities around the world and those in IBM research, development and services organizations.
Bergman is director of the Lightwave Research Laboratory. She and her research group have recently welcomed Dr. Franz Fidler, the recipient of the prestigious Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellowship, to the group. His efforts will be focused on Cross-Layer Communications in Optical Networks, which is in collaboration with Dr. Peter Winzer of Bell Research Laboratories, Lucent-Alcatel.
The Bergman group has received two recent research grants. The first is a three-year award from Intel Corporation to sponsor research on Multi-wavelength Striped Optical Interconnect for High Performance Cluster Computing. This research will be carried out in collaboration with Dr. Madeleine Glick of Intel Research. The second grant is to participate in developing the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) suite of experimental network research infrastructure sponsored by the National Science Foundation.
The Columbia team led by Bergman was selected as one of the 29 academic/industrial research teams to build, integrate, and begin to operate the first prototypes of the GENI suite of network research infrastructure. Their project at Columbia will focus on embedding real-time substrate measurements for cross-layer communications. As envisioned by the community, this suite will support a wide range of network science and engineering experiments such as new protocols and data dissemination techniques running over a substantial fiber optic infrastructure with next-generation optical switches, novel high-speed routers, city-wide experimental urban radio networks, high-end computational clusters, and sensor grids. All infrastructures are envisioned to be shared among a large number of individual, simultaneous experiments with extensive instrumentation that makes it easy to collect, analyze, and share real measurements.
In other Bergman research group news, first year graduate student Nava Chitrik was awarded both the AT&T Research Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Professor Keren Bergman and Professor Steven Nowick Named IEEE Fellow
Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering News & Events
Congratulations to Prof. Keren Bergman and Prof. Steven Nowick for their elevation to IEEE Fellow! Prof. Bergman was lauded for her contributions to development of optical interconnection and transport networks, and Prof. Nowick for his contributions to asynchronous and mixed-timing integrated circuits and systems. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for Fellow elevation, one of the Institute’s most prestigious honors.
Professor Keren Bergman Receives Intel Grant
Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering News & Events
Prof. Bergman received a 3-year award grant from Intel Corporation in sponsorship of her research on "Multi-wavelength Striped Optical Interconnect for High Performance Cluster Computing." This research will be carried out in collaboration with Dr. Madeleine Glick of Intel Research.
Professor Keren Bergman Receives 2008 IBM Faculty Award
Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering News & Events
Prof. Bergman is a recipient of the 2008 IBM Faculty Award for her research on nanophotonic networks-on-chip. This award was sponsored by Dr. Jeff Kash at the IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center. The IBM Faculty Awards is a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations.
Professor Keren Bergman to Take Part in Developing Next-Gen Integrated Access Networks
Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering News & Events
University of Arizona Office of University Communications, UANews
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $18.5 million grant to establish an engineering research center based at The University of Arizona. The center, or ERC, will focus on removing one of the last bottlenecks in the Internet by developing optoelectronic technologies for high-bandwidth, low-cost, widespread access networks. Together with USC Professor Alan Willner, Professor Keren Bergman will lead the system and networking research thrust of the center.
The UA and nine partner universities will collaborate as the Center for Integrated Access Networks, or CIAN, to create an advanced optical access network capable of delivering data more than a thousand times faster to users at lower cost than they now pay to connect to information data bases and communication networks.