Welcome to the 33rd iteration of the IEEE Hot Interconnects symposium. HotI’2026 will be held virtually.

2026 Conference Theme
Scale-Up, Scale-Out, Scale-Across: Do they really differ?
Complex high-capacity training and disaggregated inference workloads are being scaled-across multiple sites, blurring the lines between contemporary scale-out and scale-up interconnection stacks. All the classical issues, such as jitter, bursts, flow/congestion, long-tail latencies, etc., are amplified over long distances, requiring deliberate interventions across the full interconnection stack: algorithms, operational tools, communication frameworks, and network fabrics. This edition of Hot Interconnects will explore these interventions behind operationalizing interconnects over long, short, and shorter distances.



Call for Papers [details]

Event Deadline (AoE)
Paper abstract deadline May 9, 2026
May 20, 2026
Submission deadline May 15, 2026
May 20, 2026
Notification of acceptance June 26, 2026
Camera-ready due July 17, 2026

Call for Tutorials [details]

Event Date
Proposals due June 5, 2026
Notification of acceptance June 12, 2026
Materials due July 31, 2026

HotI33 (2026) Overview

IEEE Hot Interconnects is the premier international forum for researchers and developers of state of the art hardware and software architectures and implementations for interconnection networks of all scales, ranging from multi-core on-chip interconnects to those within systems, clusters, and data centers. Leaders in industry and academia attend the conference to interact with individuals at the forefront of this field.

Our objective is to address the data center networking and the supercomputing communities. We hope you can join us and benefit not only by the content but also by the prime networking opportunities this event always offers.

Keynotes

Gilad Shainer Omar Baldonado Bilal Riaz
Gilad Shainer Omar Baldonado Bilal Riaz
Senior Vice President Marketing at NVIDIA Vice Director of DC Networking at Meta Senior Director of Product Line Management and Head of Interconnect Strategy, Ciena
TBD
[details] 		TBD
[details] 		TBD
[details]

Panel

Title: Interconnects at the Edge Data Center: What are the roles of Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across now?
Moderator: Timothy Crawford, Managing Director at KeyBanc Capital Markets
Abstract: Inference is moving in a big way from the Core to the Edge, in the form of Edge data centers (and smaller things at the edge), whether operated by Neoclouds, specialized operators, industries, or enterprises. How do the interconnects within and between these Edge data centers differ from those of the Core? Where do the constraints of power and latency influence the architectures and technologies for Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across? When do they operate cooperatively versus standalone? When is the connection to the Core considered Scale-Across or just the WAN? In this panel we will examine this critical, emerging venue for interconnects and learn what it can tell us about these classifications and applicable technologies. [details]

Lightning Session

The week before OFC (the Optical Fiber Communication Conference) held in Los Angeles in March, four new Multi-Source Agreements (MSAs) were announced. Each is designed to accelerate design choices for some aspect of the AI data center, ideally in a way that serves the needs of the operator customers. They are not intended to give any vendor an advantage over the others but are meant to speed deployment by getting the suppliers (sources) to agree on some not-very-controversial aspects of these solutions. For each MSA, we have asked one of the founding companies to speak and to explain what problem the MSA is solving, why all the existing standards bodies and consortia are not solving that problem, what the MSA promises to actually produce, how the MSA will avoid stifling innovation, and how companies can join the MSA.

  • OCI MSA, focusing on the optical compute interface; speaker: [Drew Alduino] (Meta)
  • Open CPX MSA, focusing on co-packaged optics or copper (speaker: TBD)
  • SDM4 MCF MSA, focusing on multi-core fiber; speaker: Ryan Hu (Terahop)
  • XPO MSA, focusing on extreme pluggable optics; speaker: Sunil Priyadarshi (Arista)

Last Year’s Proceedings (HotI32 (2025))

Available at IEEE here.

Watch the recordings of all sessions and talks on YouTube.

Last Year’s Publications (HotI32 (2025))

Available at IEEE Micro.