News

Aneek James has successfully defended his thesis, "Ultra-Broadband Silicon Photonic Link Design and Optimization". Dr. James will next be heading to Draper Laboratory to work as a Senior Photonics Engineer. We wish him the best with this next stage of his career!

In this episode of the @HPCpodcast, Shahin and Doug spoke with a leading silicon photonics expert, Keren Bergman, Columbia University’s Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering, Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative, and Principal Investigator of the university’s Lightwave Research Laboratory. Prof. Bergman is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica (Optical Society of America) and of IEEE.

Our paper Petabit-Scale Silicon Photonic Interconnects With Integrated Kerr Frequency Combs is featured on the Front Cover of IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (Volume 29 Number 1) Issue on Nonlinear Integrated Photonics.

Columbia Engineering has won a $35 million five-year grant to establish the Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC) and advance energy-efficient communications technologies for addressing the vastly growing connectivity bottlenecks between data-hungry wireless devices and deluged data centers. Over the next five years, CUbiC will strive to flatten the computation-communication gap, delivering seamless Edge-to-Cloud connectivity with transformational reductions in the global system energy consumption.

HPCwire’s Tiffany Trader interviews ISC 2022 Program Chair Keren Bergman, ISC 2022 Deputy Chair John Shalf, and Nages Sieslack (marketing communications manager for ISC) in Hamburg. They cover show highlights, what it’s like being back in Hamburg and major HPC trends — including composability, photonics and European supercomputing.

Photonics has been used for computer communication at larger distances. Due to performance, power, and packaging, photonics holds promise for moving further to and onto chips. This is called silicon photonics.

Congratulations to Professor Keren Bergman on being the 2022 HPCwire Person to Watch as well as ISC 2022 Program Chair! It’s a big year for ISC, with the conference returning to an in-person event after two years of having a digital format. Keren Bergman is a Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University as well as the director and Principle Investigator of the Lightwave Research Laboratory, a world renowned research group focusing on increasing data bandwidth and reducing energy costs in high performance data centers. 

The allure of “technology resource disaggregation” – a.k.a., composable computing – doesn’t get old. It’s an ingenious yet common-sense strategy for addressing our increasingly heterogeneous HPC-AI world where no single system can cost-effectively satisfy the range of workloads needed to be kept in play, each workload having its own unique combination of system requirements that would otherwise produce, in a single system, “marooned” resources that sap budgets. Put another way, with a composable HPC infrastructure there are pools of compute, memory, and storage resources enabling…

As the computing world looks for ways to speed processing and reduce latency across various devices and systems, new and powerful frameworks are emerging. Many of these systems continue to run into the same vexing problem: the interconnects on microchips use electronic signals to transport data over copper wire between integrated circuits (IC).

Profs Keren Bergman, Alex Gaeta, and Michal Lipson win funding for phase 2 of their project, Photonic Integrated Networked Energy-efficient Datacenters

• Performance Requirements for Terabit-class Silicon Photonic Links Based on Cascaded Microring Resonators
• Silicon Photonic Switch Topologies and Routing Strategies for Disaggregated Data Centers
• Bandwidth steering in HPC using silicon nanophotonics
• Multi-Stage 8× 8 Silicon Photonic Switch based on Dual-Microring Switching Elements

Grant supports the development of a new class of on-chip optical interconnects that scale performance without increasing energy costs