As AI infrastructure outgrows tightly coupled systems, we’re witnessing a shift toward openness and modularity in designing full-stack solutions for AI. In this session, we’ll examine the rise of Software-Driven Fabrics (SDF) , a programmable, vendor-neutral control plane for modern AI networking. SDF makes real-time data coordination across heterogeneous accelerators and fabrics possible, offering a new, democratized model for GPU scalability and network resiliency.
Software Infra
Prashanth Thinakaran
Distinguished AI Infrastructure Engineer
Clockwork Systems
Prashanth Thinakaran is a Distinguished AI Infrastructure Engineer at Clockwork Systems, a pioneer in nano-second precise network telemetry and software-driven resilience that addresses the unprecedented scale, performance, and reliability Modern AI workloads demand from GPU clusters. In this role, he partners with AI Infrastructure teams at enterprises, hyperscalers and neoclouds to increase their visibility into issues impacting cluster uptime and optimize their availability and utilization with Clockwork’s solution.
Previously, he helped AI-native companies build on cloud-based GPU platforms, providing deep technical guidance on distributed training and inference, multi-node scaling, and performance tuning across complex infrastructure stacks. His Neocloud experience bridged the gap between product engineering and customer enablement, helping fast-moving teams adopt best practices in massive-scale model deployment and operations. Prior to that, Prashanth played a pivotal role at Cerebras Systems - a market leader in high-speed inferencing, - in the design, and deployment of Condor Galaxy 1, a Wafer-scale supercomputer. His work enabled rapid deployment timelines and seamless scaling of AI infrastructure across globally distributed data centers designed for both Inference and Training.
Prashanth also holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Penn State, where his research focused on high-performance computing and cloud systems. His academic work has been published in top-tier venues including USENIX NSDI, ACM Middleware, ICDCS, and ACM SoCC. He has authored over a dozen peer-reviewed papers and a book chapter, and served as a reviewer for journals such as IEEE TPDS and TCC. During his Ph.D., he held teaching roles in systems programming, and computer architecture, and collaborated with Intel, VMware, and Adobe Research through internships, solving systems challenges at the intersection of academia and industry.
Systems Optimization
Memory
Volker Politz
CSO
Semidynamics
Volker Politz is the Chief Sales officer at Semidynamics, responsible for all IP sales and business development activities as well as product marketing. Prior to this, he was VP sales at Roviero, held EU Sales and Global Auto Business management positions in Verisilicon and worked as IP sales manager in Synopsys Europe. He was Vice President of Product and Segment Marketing at Imagination Technologies. He is an international marketing, business development and management executive with over 30 years’ experience in semiconductor and technology companies. He also held roles and responsibilities in Europe, Asia and the United States with experience built from engineering, marketing, sales, and general management positions at Hitachi and Renesas. He has broad know-how in vertical domains such as digital multimedia, broadcast technologies, automotive, industrial, mobile, security and AI. Volker holds a Masters engineering degree in communication electronics from Fachhochschule Konstanz, Germany and an MBA from Open University, United Kingdom.
Marc Evans
Director of Business Development & Marketing
Andes Tech
Marc Evans is a semiconductor executive with deep expertise in CPU and DSP IP and SoC architecture. At Andes Technology USA, he leads branding, go-to-market strategy, and strategic partnerships for Andes and its high-performance RISC-V subsidiary, Condor Computing.
He began his career in processor and memory system design at Amdahl, Hewlett-Packard, and Rambus, and was an early R&D team member at Tensilica. He later held leadership roles at Tensilica and CEVA, driving IP adoption across global accounts. Marc holds a B.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
RISC-V
Website: https://riscv.org/
RISC-V International is the non-profit home of the open standard RISC-V Instruction Set
Architecture (ISA), related specifications, and stakeholder community. More than 2,900 RISC-V
members across 70 countries contribute and collaborate to define RISC-V open specifications as
well as convene and govern related technical, industry, domain, and special interest groups.
RISC-V combines a modular technical approach with an open, royalty-free license model --
meaning that anyone, anywhere can benefit from the IP contributed and produced by RISC-V.
RISC-V enables the community to share technical investment, contribute to the strategic future,
create more rapidly, enjoy unprecedented design freedom, and substantially reduce the cost of
innovation. To learn more, visit www.riscv.org.
2025-2035 and beyond is AI calling in the Physical world. AI will scale and touch all of our lives and everything we interact with. Sima.ai are focused on leading the Physical AI era.
In this session, you’ll learn about:
- The difference between Physical AI and its scaling in various verticals
- SiMa.ai and its technology enablement for customers focused on Physical AI
- Customer proof points (presented by customers) embarking on this transition
Krishna Rangasayee
Founder and CEO
SiMa.ai
Krishna Rangasayee is Founder and CEO of SiMa.ai. Previously, Krishna was COO of Groq and at Xilinx for 18 years, where he held multiple senior leadership roles including Senior Vice President and GM of the overall business, and Executive Vice President of global sales. While at Xilinx, Krishna grew the business to $2.5B in revenue at 70% gross margin while creating the foundation for 10+ quarters of sustained sequential growth and market share expansion. Prior to Xilinx, he held various engineering and business roles at Altera Corporation and Cypress Semiconductor. He holds 25+ international patents and has served on the board of directors of public and private companies.
In this session, learn how Amazon SageMaker HyperPod delivers a highly resilient and performant infrastructure purpose-built for training foundation models at scale. We will explore the latest HyperPod innovations that leading AI model development organizations such as Perplexity, Stability AI, and Hugging Face leverage to build state-of-the-art models. You will also discover how to efficiently build your own foundation models that work on your private data by customizing Amazon Nova or popular open-weight models like Llama. Whether you're fine tuning a model or building one from scratch, Amazon SageMaker AI makes it fast, cost-effective and scalable.
Software Infra
Sumit Thakur
Senior Manager, AI Product Management
AWS
Systems Optimization
Haseeb Budhani
Co-Founder & CEO
Rafay Systems
Haseeb Budhani is the CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems. He previously co-founded and led Soha Systems, which was acquired by Akamai Technologies, where he later served as Vice President of Enterprise Strategy. Haseeb has also held executive and leadership roles at Infineta Systems, NET, and several other technology companies. He holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
Vinesh Sukumar
VP of Product Management for AI
Qualcomm
Vinesh Sukumar currently serves as VP of Product Management for AI at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc (QTI). In this role, he leads AI product definition, strategy and solution deployment across multiple business units.
He has about 20 years of industry experience spread across research, engineering and application deployment. He currently holds a doctorate degree specializing in imaging and vision systems while also completing a business degree focused on strategy and marketing. He is a regular speaker in many AI industry forums and has authored several journal papers and two technical books.
Sebastien Jean
CTO
Phison
Sebastien Jean is the Chief Technology Officer at Phison Electronics, where he focuses on developing technology strategy and building alliances with other innovative companies.
His current focus includes AI, Space, Security, and Enterprise solutions.
Sebastien also works closely with engineering teams to help integrate new concepts into products. With 26 years of experience and over 30 filed patents, he has established himself as a thought leader in the storage industry.
Before joining Phison, he held senior technology positions at Micron, SanDisk, and Western Digital. He earned a BS in Computer Science at the University of Ottawa (Canada).
AK Karan
VP, Advanced Engineering & Innovation
Baxter International
A.K. Karan is the VP of advanced engineering & innovation at Baxter International, a leading medical device supplier. Karan joined Baxter in 2021 and currently leads the strategy for the company’s automation, digital-transformation, and operational-excellence processes. Prior to joining Baxter, Karan held a variety of leadership roles spanning engineering, operations and digital transformation.
Optimized Infrastructure
Enterprise Use Case
Hyungjun Kim
CEO
Squeezebits
Systems Optimization
Venkatesh Ramamurthy
Principal Engineer
Microsoft
Dharmesh Jani
Director of AI Infrastructure Ecosystem & Partnerships
Meta
Vaishali Ghiya
VP, Global Datacenter Services.
Wesco
Vaishali Ghiya has 27+ years of experience in Networking, Cloud and Security Sales, Solution Architecture, Systems Engineering, Product Management, Strategic Alliances and Engineering capacities, transforming 200+ people team. She is recognized as Top 50 Women Leaders of San Francisco.
Jonmichael Hands
CEO
FarmGPU
Jonmichael (JM) is a storage and AI expert, and sustainability leader. JM is currently the CEO of FarmGPU, an AI infrastructure company which hosts a decentralized cloud for AI on-demand compute and storage - and also partnering with Solidigm for the innovative AI central storage lab.
Jonmichael spent ten years at Intel in the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions group working on product line management, strategic planning, and technical marketing for the Intel data center SSDs. Jonmichael is the president of the Circular Drive Initiative, 501(c)(6) non-profit, promoting the secure reuse of drives and circular business models for the storage industry. Jonmichael started his storage career at Sun Microsystems designing storage arrays (JBODs) and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines.
Moderator
James Kelly
VP Market Intelligence & Innovation
Open Compute Project
James joined the OCP Foundation staff in 2024 as VP Market Intelligence and Innovation, working with technology leaders in the community and augmenting the foundation’s directional strategy, innovation efforts and marketing. His contributions to the OCP proceed from over two decades of experience in technology research, engineering, product management and marketing.