MPL DLS Talk: Scaling Energy-Efficient AI Systems Performance with Photonic Connectivity

Speaker: Keren Bergman (Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University)

Abstract
High-performance systems are increasingly bottlenecked by the energy and communication costs of moving data across compute and memory resources. While on-chip and intra-socket links offer massive bandwidth, off-chip communication lags by nearly two orders of magnitude, and the energy per bit of data movement now dominates that of computation. Integrated silicon photonics offers a path to high-bandwidth-density optical connectivity with dramatically lower power. Realizing these benefits, however, requires tight co-integration of photonics with compute and memory. This talk will describe scalable photonic I/O approaches capable of Petabit/s chip-escape bandwidths at sub-picojoule/bit energies, along with new architectural techniques that deliver flexible, reconfigurable connectivity for accelerating distributed AI/ML workloads.

Biography
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. 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. Since 2023 Bergman is the Director of the Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC), a 5-year multi-university center funded by DARPA and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) under the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0). 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 the Optica C.E.K. Mees Medal. Bergman is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE.

Zoom Link
https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/j/61775060598?pwd=pDuCes1BRcNhQ4bZbofgbCERx1lFaF.1
Meeting-ID: 617 7506 0598
Kenncode: 703028
Further Information: https://mpl.mpg.de/de/events/termin/keren-bergman