Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York NY

“Petascale photonic connectivity for energy efficient AI computing”

Tuesday 14 February, 4.25pm – 5.10pm

Abstract

High-performance systems are increasingly bottlenecked by the energy and communications costs of interconnecting numerous compute and memory resources. Integrated silicon photonics offer the opportunity of embedding optical connectivity that directly delivers high off-chip communication bandwidth densities with low power consumption. Our recent work has shown how integrated silicon photonics with comb-driven dense wavelength-division multiplexing can scale to realize Pb/s chip escape bandwidths with sub-picojoule/bit energy consumption. Beyond alleviating the bandwidth/energy bottlenecks, embedded photonics can enable new architectures that leverage the distance independence of optical transmission with flexible connectivity tailored to accelerate distributed ML applications.

Bio

Keren Bergman is the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University where she also serves as the Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative. Prof. Bergman received the B.S. from Bucknell University in 1988, and the M.S. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1994 from M.I.T. all in Electrical Engineering. At Columbia, Bergman leads the Lightwave Research Laboratory encompassing multiple cross-disciplinary programs at the intersection of computing and photonics. Bergman serves on the Leadership Council of the American Institute of Manufacturing (AIM) Photonics leading projects that support the institute’s silicon photonics manufacturing capabilities and Datacom applications. She is the recipient of the IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.

Slides