Paolo Costa at Microsoft Research

Principal Researcher

About

News and Events

I am always looking for energetic and motivated students to work with. If you are interested in an internship in networking, distributed systems, and/or FPGAs, please drop me an email.

Our paper “Synchronous subnanosecond clock and data recovery for optically switched data centres using clock phase caching” has been published on the July 2020 issue of Nature Electronics (press coverage)
Our paper “Sirius: A Flat Datacenter Network with Nanosecond Optical Switching” has been accepted at SIGCOMM 2020
ACM SIGCOMM 2020 Workshop on Optical Systems Design (OptSys), on August 14, 2020.
Our paper “Sub-nanosecond Optical Switching Using Chip-Based Soliton Microcombs” has been accepted at OFC’20
New blog post on the recently launched Optics for the Cloud Research Alliance

Short Bio

I am a Principal Researcher in the Systems and Networking Group of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge and an Honorary Lecturer with the Department of Computing of Imperial College London.

In the past, I had been a research faculty at Imperial College London and, prior to that, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computer Systems group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I hold a M. Sc. and Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano.

Research Interests

I am an experimental computer scientist. I validated my ideas through prototypes to understand, model, and verify observations. My research interests lie at the intersection of distributed systems and networking with particular emphasis on large-scale networked systems, ranging from sensor and mobile networks to overlay networks and data centers.

In the past, among other things, I have been working on the CamCube and Predictable Datacenters projects, aiming to providing a better integration and synergy between applications and networks in data centers to improve performance and reduce complexity. More details can be found here.

My current research brings together hardware, optics, networking, and application-level expertise to take a cross-stack view towards developing optical technologies for next-generation data-center networks, leveraging the availability of emerging hardware and optical technologies.