Hot Interconnects 2026 Program
All times below are Pacific Time (PT).
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: Dan Pitt (Palo Alto Innovation Advisors) |
| 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
|
Alejandro Cano , Cristina Brinza , Cristóbal Camarero , Carmen Martínez , Ramón Beivide | |
| Scaling Inference Prefill with High-Radix Photonic Interconnect
|
Arulselvan Madhavan , Peter Carson , Taylor Groves , Thomas Graham | |
| 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, Full 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
|
Sunil Priyadarshi , Andreas Bechtolsheim , Link Wang , Gian Carlo Lambert , Jimmy Deng , Bala Ganesh Kalirajan , Brian Park , Vijay Vusirikala , Aarushi Abraham Karimpanal , Gargi Kailkhura , William Liu , Yiduo Zhang | |
| Breaking Through the Network Wall: Petabit-Class Switching for Single-Hop MoE Training at Scale
|
Philipp Berdesinski , Laurent Montigny , John Shalf , George Michelogiannakis | |
| The Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC) Transport
|
Rip Sohan , Eric Spada , Eric Davis , Mark Handley , Idan Burstein , Tony Hurson , Jithin Jose , Vivek Kashyap , Rong Pan , Sayantan Sur , Sreevatsa Anantharamu , Aviv Barnea , Adrian Caulfield , Elazar Cohen , Elliot Edmunds , Yamin Friedman , Mahdieh Ghazi , Murali Garimella , Torsten Hoefler , Vipin Jain , Abdul Kabbani , Noam Katz , Yanfang Le , Charlie Mbariky , Guglielmo Morandin , Masoud Moshref , Shane O’Neil , Michael Papamichael , Jonas Pfefferle , Siva Santosh Pyla , Costin Raiciu , David Riddoch , Karen Schramm , Yuval Shpigelman , Shahaf Shuler , Shy Shyman , Raghava Sivaramu , Amin Tootoonchian , Yang Wang | |
| Diagnosing Hidden Interconnect Bottlenecks with Omnistat and Cassini Telemetry
|
Aaron Welch , Shubhendra Pal Singhal , Akihiro Hayashi , Jun Shirako , Oscar Hernandez , Vivek Sarkar , Steve Poole | |
| 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), Gabriel Montanti (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 | Gabe Sudduth (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 | Bole Ma , Jan Eitzinger , Harald Köstler , Gerhard Wellein | |
| From Datacenter to Wide Area: Scale-Across Federated Learning on Real Long-Haul RDMA | Zhonghao Chen , Yuke Li , Xiaoyi Lu | |
| Demystifying NVSHMEM: A System-Level Analysis on Symmetric Memory and Device-Initiated Operations in GPU Communication | Yijun Ma , Siyuan Shen , Tiancheng Chen , Akhil Langer , Jiri Kraus , Benjamin Glick , Craig Belusar , Jeff Hammond , Torsten Hoefler | |
| 15:30 - 15:40 | HotI Awards | Ryan Grant (Queen’s University), Yiltan Temucin (NVIDIA) 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), Michal Rajski (Jülich Supercomputing Centre) and Andreas Herten (Jülich Supercomputing Centre)
Session chairs: Mike Adams, Jackson Wesley (University of New Mexico) |
| 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) Session chairs: Mike Adams, Jackson Wesley (University of New Mexico) |
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), Swadesh Choudhary (Intel), Joe Wu (Intel), Gerald Pasdast (Intel) 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) Session chair: Shannon Kinkead (Sandia National Laboratories) |
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) Session chair: Amanda Bienz (University of New Mexico) |