Portrait of Paolo Costa

Paolo Costa

Senior 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 optics, networking, distributed systems, and/or FPGAs, please drop me an email.

Short Bio

I am a Senior Principal Researcher in the Cloud Systems Futures 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 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.