Paolo Costa

About

News and Events

• Our paper “MOSAIC: Breaking the Optics versus Copper Trade-off with a Wide-and-Slow Architecture and MicroLEDs” received the Best Paper Award (opens in new tab) at ACM SIGCOMM 2025.
• We’ve published a new technical blog with Azure and M365 on how a wide-and-slow architecture and microLEDs enable low-power, low-cost, reliable, and long-reach optical communication to overcome one of the key bottleneck in AI clusters.

Short Bio

I am a Partner Research Manager in the Cloud Systems Futures group of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge and an Honorary Lecturer with the Department of Computing (opens in new tab) of Imperial College London (opens in new tab).

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

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 optical networked systems for 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.