Tuesday, 26 March,
16:00
–
17:00
Theater II
Session Description:
New Machine Learning (ML) infrastructure, motivated by the recent explosive interest in Ai and particularly LLM compute applications, has recently dominated the Data Center investment growth, and its growth is expected to continue strong over the coming years, reportedly aiming to scale 10x every 2 years through a combination of faster chips (GPU, TPU, NPU etc) and larger ML network clusters. The OFC 2024 IEEE panel aims to review the important related IEEE technologies, and more specifically focus on debating, beyond hype, the role of photonics in the ML network infrastructure.
Organized by: 
Moderator
Loukas Paraschis, Alphawave Semi, United States
About Loukas Paraschis:
Loukas Paraschis is Vice President for the connectivity products group at Alphawave Semi, which he joined in October 2022 through the acquisition of the optical DSP start-up Banias Labs. Before Banias, Loukas was senior director and CTO of cloud transport system engineering for Internet and content providers for 5 years at Infinera, and for 15 years at cisco where he worked mainly on next generation optical and routing systems for wireline transport networks. He has (co)authored more than 100 peer‐reviewed publications, invited and tutorial presentations, and book chapters, 8 patents, and has served in many IEEE and OSA leadership positions, including the OFC and JOCN steering and long-range planning committees, was the IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer (2009), and is an OPTICA (OSA) Fellow (elected in 2011). Loukas graduated from Stanford University (PhD 1999, MS 1998) where he worked at the Ginzton, the Information Systems, and the Networking Research laboratories. He was born and raised in Athens, Greece, where he completed his undergraduate studies.
Speakers
Jag Brar, Oracle Cloud, United States
About Jag Brar:
Jag Brar is a Distinguished Engineer and VP at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). At OCI, Jag is responsible for all aspects of Networking, including Physical Networking, Virtual Networking, Datacenter Networking, Backbone Networking, Datacenter Optics, and Metro Optics. Jag has been leading OCI’s RDMA-enabled RoCE networks. These networks support large-scale HPC applications, Oracle Database Services, and GPU-ML applications. Before OCI, Jag worked at Arista Networks, AT&T Labs, Amazon, Terabeam Networks, Electric Lightwave, and Telus Communications. Jag has a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and computer science. Jag has over eighty issued patents and patent applications
Vincent Chan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
About Vincent Chan:
Vincent W. S. Chan, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor of EECS, MIT, received his BS(71), MS(71), EE(72), and Ph.D.(74) degrees in EE all from MIT. From 1974 to 1977, he was an assistant professor, EE, at Cornell University. He joined MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1977 and had been Division Head of the Communications and Information Technology Division until becoming the Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (1999–2007). He is currently a member of the Claude E. Shannon Communication and Network Group at the Research Laboratory of Electronics of MIT.
Ram Huggahalli, Microsoft, United States
About Ram Huggahalli:
Ram Huggahalli is a Principal Hardware Engineer in the Strategic Planning and Architecture organization within the Azure Hardware organization at Microsoft. Ram guides compute platform strategies for enabling accelerators and new rack-level systems architectures with a focus on interconnects. He has been with Microsoft for 4 years leading an optical workstream, scoping PCIe and CXL requirements for next generation compute platforms and evaluating trade-offs with disaggregated systems. He currently represents Microsoft at OCP SIOV Project and the OIF Physical Layer User Group. Prior to Microsoft, Ram was with Intel with contributions to several technologies such as IOAT, Omni Path Architecture and large-scale systems/interconnect modeling. He has Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Engineering Management from the University of Missouri.
Ashkan Seyedi, Nvidia, United States
About Ashkan Seyedi:
Ashkan Seyedi, Nvidia Principal Silicon Photonics Products, received the dual bachelors degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, working on photonic crystal devices, high-speed nanowire photodetectors, efficient white LEDs, and solar cells. Prior to Nvidia was with Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a Research Scientist, working on developing high-bandwidth, efficient optical interconnects for exascale and high-performance computing applications