Ola Tørudbakken,

Director AI Systems

Meta

Ola has 30 years of experience building distributed systems and high-performance networking across AI, HPC, Enterprise and Telco. 

Ola currently serves as Director of AI Systems at Meta. Previously Ola was SVP Systems at Graphcore, driving their 2nd generation AI systems. Ola came to Graphcore through the acquisition of Skala Technologies, an AI startup he co-founded. Prior to Skala, Ola worked as Chief Architect of Networking and Netra Servers at Oracle. Ola joined Oracle through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Ola served as Distinguished Engineer, amongst many things responsible for the famous 3456-port Magnum Infiniband Switch now on display in the Computer Museum, Silicon Valley. Prior to Sun Ola was at Dolphin ICS, acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2000. Ola started his career as a research scientist at SINTEF, a Norwegian industrial research organization.

Ola is a recognized industry expert in distributed systems, holds over 48 patents, has published several papers in leading publications, and participated in numerous standardization bodies. Ola holds an MSc degree in Computer Science from University of Oslo in 1994

Marc Tremblay

Technical Fellow & Corporate VP

Microsoft

Marc is a Distinguished Engineer and VP in the Office of the CTO (OCTO) at Microsoft. His current role is to drive the strategic and technical direction of the company on silicon and hardware systems from a cross-divisional standpoint. This includes Artificial Intelligence, from supercomputer to client devices to Xbox, etc., and general-purpose computing. Throughout his career, Marc has demonstrated a passion for translating high-level application requirements into optimizations up and down the stack, all the way to silicon. AI has been his focus for the past several years, but his interests also encompass accelerators for the cloud, scale-out systems, and process technology. He has given multiple keynotes on AI Hardware, published many papers on throughput computing, multi-cores, multithreading, transactional memory, speculative multi-threading, Java computing, etc. and he is an inventor of over 300 patents on those topics.

Prior to Microsoft, Marc was the CTO of Microelectronics at Sun Microsystems. As a Sun Fellow and SVP, he was responsible for the technical leadership of 1200 engineers. Throughout his career, he has started, architected, led, defined and shipped a variety of microprocessors such as superscalar RISC processors (UltraSPARC I/II), bytecode engines (picoJava), VLIW, media and Java-focused (MAJC), and the first processor to implement speculative multithreading and transactional memory (ROCK – first silicon). He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Sciences from UCLA and his Physics Engineering degree from Laval University in Canada. Marc is on the board of directors of QuantalRF.