Hot Interconnects 2026 Program
All times below are Pacific Time (PT). The program is subject to change.
Conference Day 1: Wednesday, August 19
| Time | Title | Presenters |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 - 09:15 | Introduction & Day 1 Welcome | Sayan Ghosh (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) |
| 09:15 - 10:15 |
Keynote 1: Lessons from networking Meta’s gigawatt-scale AI fleet [details] |
Omar Baldonado (Meta) Session chair: Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) |
| 10:15 - 10:30 |
Diamond Sponsor Talk: Lightmatter BiDi DWDM: The Interconnect Foundation for High-Performance AI Training and Inference [details] |
Nick Harris Session chair: Sayan Ghosh (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) |
| 10:30 - 10:40 | Break | |
| 10:40 - 11:40 | Technical Paper Session A: Network Design at Scale | Session chair: Kapil Shrikhande (Upscale AI) |
| Multipass Random Leaf-Spine Networks for Extreme Scale Computing Systems | ||
| Scaling Inference Prefill with High-Radix Photonic Interconnect | ||
| 11:40 - 11:50 |
Platinum Sponsor Talk: Broadcom Distributed Computing @ Scale for AI Training & Inference [details] |
Mohan Kalkunte Session chair: Kapil Shrikhande (Upscale AI) |
| 11:50 - 12:00 |
Platinum Sponsor Talk: Cisco Ethernet for Shared AI Fabrics: InfiniBand-Class Performance with Multi-Tenant Scale [details] |
Will Eatherton Session chair: Kapil Shrikhande (Upscale AI) |
| 12:00 - 12:10 |
Platinum Sponsor Talk: Meta Co-Designing MTIA’s Communication Stack [details] |
Kirtesh Patil Session chair: Kapil Shrikhande (Upscale AI) |
| 12:10 - 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 13:00 - 14:00 | Technical Paper Session B: Hot Topic Presentations | Session chair: Darius Bunandar (Lightmatter) |
| Demonstration of the 12.8T 8×DR8 High-Density Liquid-Cooled 64-Channel Pluggable XPO LRO Module and XPO Emulation Platform | ||
| Breaking Through the Network Wall: Petabit-Class Switching for Single-Hop MoE Training at Scale | ||
| The Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) Transport | ||
| Diagnosing Hidden Interconnect Bottlenecks with Omnistat and Cassini Telemetry | ||
| 14:00 - 15:30 |
Panel: Interconnects at the Edge Data Center: What are the roles of Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across now? [details] |
Panelists: Inder Monga (ESnet), Yosuke Aragane (NTT), Tanner Ryan (Cloudflare), Marc Austin (Hedgehog), Ofer Shapiro (Resolight), Amy Leeland (GEICO) Session chair: Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) Moderator: Timothy Crawford (KeyBanc Capital Markets) |
| 15:30 - 15:45 | The Head Bubba Memorial and HotI Closing Remarks Day 1 | Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) |
Conference Day 2: Thursday, August 20
| Time | Title | Presenters |
|---|---|---|
| 08:50 - 09:00 | Day 2 Welcome | Sayan Ghosh (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) |
| 09:00 - 10:00 |
Keynote 2: Networking Innovations for Gigascale AI Systems [details] |
Gilad Shainer (NVIDIA) Session chair: Ron Brightwell (Sandia National Laboratories) |
| 10:00 - 10:15 |
Diamond Sponsor Talk: Marvell A Shared Memory Architecture for Token-Efficient AI Infrastructure [details] |
Ravi Mahatme Session chair: Ron Brightwell (Sandia National Laboratories) |
| 10:15 - 10:30 |
Diamond Sponsor Talk: Napatech AI Fabrics in Motion: Programmable Interconnects for Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across [details] |
Alex Omø Agerholm Session chair: Ron Brightwell (Sandia National Laboratories) |
| 10:30 - 10:40 | Break | |
| 10:40 - 11:40 |
MSA Lightning Talk Session [details] |
Session chair: Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) |
| OCI | Drew Alduino (Meta) | |
| Open CPX | Ryan Yu (TeraHop) | |
| SDM4 MCF | Duane Robbins (Corning) | |
| XPO | Sunil Priyadarshi (Arista) | |
| 11:40 - 11:50 |
Platinum Sponsor Talk: Qualcomm Scaling AI with Chiplets & CPO [details] |
Dave Kulansky Session chair: Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) |
| 11:50 - 12:00 |
Platinum Sponsor Talk: Eliyan From Long Reach to Smart Reach: The Evolution of SerDes for AI Infrastructure [details] |
Rohan Gandhi Session chair: Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) |
| 12:00 - 13:00 | Lunch | |
| 13:00 - 14:00 |
Keynote 3: The Future of AI Interconnects: Open Approaches to High-Performance AI Infrastructure [details] |
Bilal Riaz (Ciena) Session chair: Pasha Shamis (NVIDIA) |
| 14:00 - 15:30 | Technical Paper Session C: Distributed AI Communication | Session chair: Shelby Lockhart (AMD) |
| Diagnosing Overhead in Dispatch Operations: Cross-architecture Observatory | ||
| From Datacenter to Wide Area: Scale-Across Federated Learning on Real Long-Haul RDMA | ||
| Demystifying NVSHMEM: A System-Level Analysis on Symmetric Memory and Device-Initiated Operations in GPU Communication | ||
| 15:30 - 15:40 | HotI Awards | Ryan Grant (Queen’s University) Session chair: Ryan Grant (Queen’s University) |
| 15:40 - 15:55 | HotI Closing Remarks | David Ozog (NVIDIA) |
Conference Day 3: Friday, August 21
Track 1
| Time | Title | Presenters |
|---|---|---|
| Morning Sessions | ||
| 09:00 - 12:15 | GPU Communication Libraries for Accelerating HPC and AI Applications | Benjamin Glick, Pouya Kousha (NVIDIA), Andreas Herten (Jülich Supercomputing Centre) |
| 12:15 - 13:30 | Break | |
| Afternoon Sessions | ||
| 13:30 - 16:30 | Principles and Practice of Scalable and Distributed AI Training and Inference | Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda, Nawras Alnaasan (The Ohio State University) |
Track 2
| Time | Title | Presenters |
|---|---|---|
| Morning Sessions | ||
| 08:00 - 11:00 | Open Interconnect Innovations: A Deep Dive into the UALink Chiplet Specification Tutorial presented by UALink and UCIe Consortia | Rob Pelt (AMD), Peter Onufryk (Intel Corporation) Session chair: Shannon Kinkead (Sandia National Laboratories) |
| 11:00 - 11:30 | Break | |
| Afternoon Sessions | ||
| 11:30 - 15:15 | A Practical Guide to Communication Libraries on AMD GPUs | Aurelien Bouteiller, Corey Derochie, Edgar Gabriel, Nusrat Islam (AMD) |
Track 3
| Time | Title | Presenters |
|---|---|---|
| Morning Sessions | ||
| 09:00 - 12:00 | High Performance and Smart Networking Technologies for HPC and AI | Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda, Benjamin Michalowicz (The Ohio State University) Session chair: Amanda Bienz (University of New Mexico) |
| 12:00 - 12:30 | Break | |
| Afternoon Sessions | ||
| 12:30 - 17:00 | Understanding Communication Performance on Emerging Heterogeneous Architectures | Bob Robey, Shelby Lockhart, Giacomo Capodaglio (AMD), Amanda Bienz, Patrick Bridges (University of New Mexico), Sameer Shende (University of Oregon) |