Persistent Memory Summit 2020 Speakers

Piotr Balcer, PMDK Architect, Intel Corporation

Piotr Balcer is a software engineer at Intel Corporation with many years’ experience working on storage-related technologies. He holds a bachelor of science in engineering from the Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland, where he studied system software engineering. Piotr has been working on the software ecosystem for next-generation persistent memory since 2014. 

Andy Bechtolsheim, Chief Development Officer, Co-Founder, and CEO, Arista Networks

As Chief Development Officer, Andy Bechtolsheim is responsible for the overall product development and technical direction of Arista Networks. Previously Andy was a Founder and Chief System Architect at Sun Microsystems, where most recently he was responsible for industry standard server architecture. Andy was also a Founder and President of Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet startup acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. From 1996 until 2003 Andy served as VP/GM of the Gigabit Systems Business Unit at Cisco that developed the very successful Catalyst 4500 family of switches. Andy was also a Founder and President of Kealia, a next generation server company acquired by Sun in 2004.

Richard A. Brunner, Principal Engineer, CTO Server Platform Technologies, VMware

Richard A. Brunner is a Principal Engineer and the CTO of Server Platform Technologies at VMware. He is responsible for defining and driving future platform features that can benefit virtualization. Richard has been focused on computer technology since 1977 as a programmer, design engineer, and then instruction set architect for IBM, DEC, Intel, and AMD. At VMware since 2006, he has been recently focusing on Non-Volatile Memory, composition of disaggregated resources, and CPU Security Vulnerabilities.

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant.  He has over 37 years in the data storage industry with engineering and management positions at several companies.  Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report), and puts on digital storage-oriented events.  He is a regular storage and memory contributor for forbes.com and M&E organization websites.  He is an IEEE Fellow, President of IEEE-USA and is active with SNIA and SMPTE. For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to www.tomcoughlin.com

Soji Denloye, Software Development Engineer, Intel Corporation

Soji Denloye has been a software engineer at Intel for seven years in open source databases team. He was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer engineering from the Illinois institute of technology in Chicago.He has worked on performance characterization of open-source, big-data frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and Cassandra. Most recently he helped develop PCJ and LLPL, which provide persistent memory support to java developers, and built a persistent memory storage engine for Cassandra.

Dave Eggleston, Principal of Intuitive Cognition Consulting

Dave Eggleston is the owner and Principal of Intuitive Cognition Consulting, and he provides strategy and business development services to leading NVM and Storage clients. Dave’s extensive background in Flash, MRAM, RRAM, and Storage is built on 30+ years of industry experience serving as VP of Embedded Memory at GLOBALFOUNDRIES, CEO of RRAM pioneer start-up Unity Semiconductor (acquired by Rambus), Director of Flash Systems Engineering at Micron, NVM Product Engineering manager at SanDisk, and NVM Engineer at AMD. Dave is frequently invited as a speaker at international conferences as an expert on emerging NVM technologies and their applications. He holds a BSEE degree from Duke University, a MSEE degree from Santa Clara University, and 25+ NVM related granted patents.

Charles Fan, Co-founder and CEO, MemVerge

Charles Fan is co-founder and CEO of MemVerge. Prior to MemVerge, Charles was the CTO of Cheetah Mobile leading its global technology teams, and an SVP/GM at VMware, founding the storage business unit that developed the Virtual SAN product. Charles also worked at EMC and was the founder of the EMC China R&D Center. Charles joined EMC via the acquisition of Rainfinity, where he was a co-founder and CTO.

Charles received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union.

Jim Fister, Principal, The Decision Place; Director, SNIA Persistent Memory Software Enabling

Jim Fister is under contract with the SNIA as Director of Persistent Memory Software Enabling, focusing on building awareness for PM programming models across the globe.  He runs his own consulting company, The Decision Place, helping companies define and accomplish their strategic goals.  Jim has nearly 30 years of technology experience in semiconductor and software industries.  When he's not working on technology, he's wandering Central Oregon and other areas of the US kicking dirt clods on various trails.  Ask him about his dogs if you get the chance.

Jim Handy, General Director, Objective Analysis

Jim Handy of Objective Analysis has over 35 years in the electronics industry including 20 years as a leading semiconductor and SSD industry analyst. Early in his career he held marketing and design positions at leading semiconductor suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon. A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his technical depth, accurate forecasts, widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of market reports, articles for trade journals, and white papers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media. He posts blogs at www.TheMemoryGuy.com and http://www.TheSSDguy.com

Eden Kim, CEO, Calypso Systems

Eden Kim is CEO of Calypso Systems, Inc., a leading developer and supplier of industry standard performance benchmarking software and test platforms.  Calypso specializes in synthetic test standards and real world workload application capture, analysis, and test for both byte addressable and block IO storage.  They host the www.testmyworkload.com website where users can download free IO capture applets, upload and view their real world workloads, and see industry standard reference application workoads.  Eden presents a series of new IOProfiler workload captures at US and international tradeshows and shares performance evaluation of real world workloads on AI/ML optimized storage, cloud storage, web portal and datacenter application perofrmance and SSD development, benchmarking, and comparative performance test.  Eden is Chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage Technical Work Group.

Millind Mittal, Fellow, Xilinx

Millind Mittal is a Xilinx Fellow and Architecture group lead for broader deployment of FPGAs as accelerators in data-centers. At Xilinx he is currently working as the chief architect for CCIX and CXL technologies development and market enablement. He is also Xilinx’s lead for ODSA effort, and is on the Board of Gen-Z consortium. Prior to Xilinx, Millind worked as lead SoC architect at Applied Micro, and held technical leadership roles at Intel. At Intel he was technical lead for defining parts of 64-bit ISA. At Intel he was also instrumental in defining MMX technology and secure execution environment capability used in SGX. He has been Founder of start-ups in networking (scalable backplane switch fabric) and storage (Smart NIC for NFS acceleration) space.   He holds 130+ patents.

Jim Pappas, SNIA Board of Directors; Director of Technology Initiatives, Data Center Group, Intel Corporation

Jim Pappas is a member of the SNIA Board of Directors and the Director of Technology Initiatives in Intel’s Data Center Group. At Intel, Jim is responsible to establish broad industry ecosystems that comply with new technologies in the areas of Enterprise I/O, Energy Efficient Computing, and Solid State Storage. Jim has founded, or served on several organizations in these areas including: PCI Special Interest Group, InfiniBand Trade Association, Open Fabrics Alliance, The Green Grid, and several emerging initiatives in his newest focus area of Solid State Storage. Jim has 30 years of experience in the computer industry. He has been granted eight U.S. patents in the areas of computer graphics and microprocessor technologies. He has spoken at major industry events including the Intel Developer’s Forum (IDF), WinHEC, Storage Networking World, PC Strategy, Microprocessor Forum, Consumer Electronics Show, Server I/O and the Applied Computing Conference. He holds a B.S.E.E. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Andy Rudoff, Member, SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group and Persistent Memory SW Architect, Intel Corporation

Andy Rudoff is a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation, focusing on Non-Volatile Memory programming. He is a contributor to the SNIA NVM Programming Technical Work Group. His more than 30 years industry experience includes design and development work in operating systems, file systems, networking, and fault management at companies large and small, including Sun Microsystems and VMware. Andy has taught various Operating Systems classes over the years and is a co-author of the popular UNIX Network Programming text book.

Scott Shadley, VP Marketing, NGD Systems

Scott Shadley is VP Marketing at NGD Systems where he leads marketing, product management, and product development for the company’s industry-leading computational storage. He has been a key figure in promoting computational storage, being co-chair of the SNIA Technical Working Group on the subject which he helped found, and speaking on the subject at Open Compute Summit, Flash Memory Summit, NVMe Developer Days, and many other events, press interviews, blogs, and webinars. Before joining NGD Systems, Scott managed the Product Marketing team at Micron, was the Business Line Manager for the SATA SSD portfolio, and was the Principal Technologist for the SSD and emerging memory portfolio. He launched four successful innovative SSDs for Micron and two for STEC, all of which were multimillion dollar sellers. Scott earned a BSEE in Device Physics from Boise State University and an MBA in marketing from University of Phoenix.

Jia Shi, Senior Director of Software Development for Exadata, Oracle Corporation

Jia Shi is Senior Director of Exadata development at Oracle.  She leads a team of very talented software developers to create the features that enable Exadata to be the fastest, most scalable and most highly available platform for running Oracle Database.  Her team has built many marquee features, such as Smart Flash Cache and Smart Flash Log.  Her current focus is building the next-generation storage solution for Exadata with Persistent Memory.  She holds MS and BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Pratap Subrahmanyam, Fellow, VMware

Pratap Subrahmanyam is a Fellow at VMware. When he started at VMware, almost 20 years back, he helped develop the software emulation for the x86’s MMU logic, a key part of the virtual machine monitor, that got VMware started. Over the years, this code saw lots of optimizations added to it, and gradually motivated Intel to provide native support for it in the x86 processor (EPT). Subsequently, he helped with the design of the memory checkpointing based fault tolerance product and also influenced Intel to add the Page Modification Log (PML) into the processor. He then led the effort in VMware to virtualize byte addressable persistent memory, and also make it usable by developing language features, runtime libraries, and enhancing garbage collectors. Over the last several years, Pratap has been focusing on using FPGAs to enhance the performance of the vSphere virtualization platform.

Yafei Yang, CEO and Co-founder of DapuStor

Dr. Yafei Yang is an expert in distributed computing, data storage and product security, with many years of research and management experience in semiconductor industry. From 2008 to 2016, he worked at Qualcomm Inc., responsible for Qualcomm product security strategy, including smartphone, IoT, automotive, router and server chipsets. Dr. Yang graduated from Beijing Univ. of Posts and Telecommunications and Univ. of Rhode Island. His research is focused on distributed computing, data storage, and information security. He has published over 20 high quality technical articles in these research fields and holds numerous issued US patents. He was invited to perform expert reviews on the technical proposals submitted under BTOP (White House Broadband Technology Opportunities Program) in 2010. To honor Dr. Yang’s outstanding contribution to US economic recovery, US Secretary of Commerce (Gary Locke) and Assistant Secretary (Lawrence Strickling) wrote appreciation letters to him.

Yao Yue, Software Architect, Twitter, Inc.

Coming soon.