Keynote Speakers

Gilad Shainer Omar Baldonado Bilal Riaz
Gilad Shainer Omar Baldonado Bilal Riaz
Senior Vice President Marketing at NVIDIA Senior Director of Networking at Meta Senior Director of Product Line Management and Head of Interconnect Strategy, Ciena
Networking Innovations for Gigascale AI Systems
[details] 		Lessons from networking Meta's gigawatt-scale AI fleet
[details] 		The Future of AI Interconnects: Open Approaches to High‑Performance AI Infrastructure
[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 open-socket NPO and CPO; speaker: Ryan Yu (Terahop)
  • SDM4 MCF MSA, focusing on multi-core fiber; speaker: Duane Robbins (Corning)
  • XPO MSA, focusing on extreme pluggable optics; speaker: Sunil Priyadarshi (Arista)