Interview: Hot Interconnects Conference to Focus on Next-Generation Networks

The Hot Interconnects Conference is coming up Aug. 28-30 in Santa Clara. To learn more, we caught up with Program Chairs Ryan Grant from Sandia and Jitu (Jitendra) Padhye.

insideHPC: How would you describe the role of Hot Interconnects in our community?

Ryan and Jitu: Hot Interconnects brings together members of the industrial, academic and broader research community to unveil the very latest advances in network technologies as well as to discuss ideas for future generation interconnects. Unlike other conferences, Hot Interconnects is focused on only the latest most topical subjects and concentrates on technologies that will be available for deployment in the near future. Hot Interconnects is a venue in which several new technologies have been talked about in great technical detail for the first time, and we strive to bring in depth technical discussion of cutting edge networks each year.

insideHPC: Who are the folks that typically attend Hot Interconnects?

Ryan and Jitu: Hot Interconnects attendees come from a broad spectrum of the networking community. High profiles attendees typically include senior and C-level management from leading companies in the industry and famous academic thought leaders. The broader group includes technical attendees working on engineering designs and developing networking specifications. Of course, Hot Interconnects is also popular with students and academics eager to learn about the latest technologies. Hot Interconnects is in Silicon Valley this year, so we expect both local attendees as well as our typical worldwide contingent of experts in networking.

insideHPC: Talking about the program, what are this year’s highlights and focal points?

Ryan and Jitu: This year we’re focusing on the hottest new topic, networking for machine learning. We have keynotes from Chuanxiong Guo from Microsoft Research RDMA and machine learning and David Allan from Ericsson on 5G networks. We also have invited talks on high speed networking at Google and the GenZ network from HP. We have a panel that is sure to be exciting on Hyperscale ethernet data center networks with senior scientists and C-level technology executives from the top companies in tech. You can find a listing of our entire program at: http://www.hoti.org/hoti25/program/

insideHPC: Do you also have other events?

Ryan and Jitu: We have a sister event this year in our cooperation with SIGCOMM, held the week before Hot Interconnects nearby in California.

insideHPC: What distinguishes HOTI from other conferences in the field?

Ryan and Jitu: We are very focused on informing attendees of the latest advances in the field, and providing the first in depth look at new technologies meant for technical experts. Unlike other technology unveilings at larger conferences, we bring technical depth and understanding rather than high level marketing.

insideHPC: So what are the conference details?

Ryan and Jitu: The conference runs from the 28th-30th of August, with tutorials on the 28th and the symposium on the 29th-30th. We are generously hosted by Ericsson at their excellent facilities in Santa Clara, CA in the heart of silicon valley. You can find more details and register today at www.hoti.org.

Ryan Grant, Sandia

Ryan Grant is a senior member of technical staff in the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico in the Computer Science Department. His research focuses on high performance networking and power management for Extreme scale systems. He is an active member of the Portals Networking Interface specification team, working on next generation high performance interconnects, including BXI, the Bull-Atos high performance Portals-based interconnect hardware. In addition, he serves on the MPI specifications body (MPI Forum), and is responsible for the Portals 4 reference implementation, Sandia-OpenSHMEM and portals related elements of Open MPI. Ryan has contributed to the Power API developed at Sandia National Labs and has published several papers on the topic of power/energy management techniques on large-scale HPC systems. He graduated with a PhD in Computer Engineering in 2012 from Queen’s University, Canada, where he was an Alexander Graham Bell National Research Scholar.

Jitu Padhye, Microsoft Research

Jitendra Padhye is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. He is interested in all aspects of computer networking and networked systems. His recent work has focused on data center networks and mobile computing. He has published numerous research papers in top conferences, and holds over 25 US patents. He is the recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM’s Test of Time award. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000.

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