Karl Freund
Karl Freund is the founder and principal analyst of Cambrian AI Research. Prior to this, he was Moor Insights & Strategy’s consulting lead for HPC and Deep Learning. His recent experiences as the VP of Marketing at AMD and Calxeda, as well as his previous positions at Cray and IBM, positions him as a leading industry expert in these rapidly evolving industries. Karl works with investment and technology customers to help them understand the emerging Deep Learning opportunity in data centers, from competitive landscape to ecosystem to strategy.
Karl has worked directly with datacenter end users, OEMs, ODMs and the industry ecosystem, enabling him to help his clients define the appropriate business, product, and go-to-market strategies. He is also recognized expert on the subject of low-power servers and the emergence of ARM in the datacenter and has been a featured speaker at scores of investment and industry conferences on this topic.
Accomplishments during his career include:
- Led the revived HPC initiative at AMD, targeting APUs at deep learning and other HPC workloads
- Created an industry-wide thought leadership position for Calxeda in the ARM Server market
- Helped forge the early relationship between HP and Calxeda leading to the surprise announcement of HP Moonshot with Calxeda in 2011
- Built the IBM Power Server brand from 14% market share to over 50% share
- Integrated the Tivoli brand into the IBM company’s branding and marketing organization
- Co-Led the integration of HP and Apollo Marketing after the Boston-based desktop company’s acquisition
Karl’s background includes RISC and Mainframe servers, as well as HPC (Supercomputing). He has extensive experience as a global marketing executive at IBM where he was VP Marketing (2000-2010), Cray where he was VP Marketing (1995-1998), and HP where he was a Division Marketing Manager (1979-1995).
Paolo Faraboschi
Paolo Faraboschi is a Vice President and HPE Fellow and directs the Artificial Intelligence Research Lab at Hewlett Packard Labs. Paolo has been at HP/HPE for three decades, and worked on a broad range of technologies, from embedded printer processors to exascale supercomputers. He previously led exascale computing research (2017-2020), and the hardware architecture of “The Machine” project (2014-2016), pioneered low-energy servers with HP’s project Moonshot (2010-2014), drove scalable system-level simulation research (2004-2009), and was the principal architect of a family of embedded VLIW cores (1994-2003), widely used in video SoCs and HP’s printers. Paolo is an IEEE Fellow (2014) for “contributions to embedded processor architecture and system-on-chip technology”, author of over 100 publications, 70 granted patents, and the book “Embedded Computing: a VLIW approach”. He received a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of Genoa, Italy.
Albert Chen
Syona Sarma
Syona Sarma is the Senior Director, Head of Hardware Systems at Cloudflare, where she runs the engineering team that builds Cloudflare's infrastructure. Since joining Cloudflare in 2022, she leads the design of the next generation servers that is foundational to all of Cloudflare's services, including compute and storage. More recently, she spearheaded the introduction of specialized accelerators designs on the edge, which enabled launch of Cloudflare's inference-as-a-service product, and is integral to the rapidly expanding suite of AI product offerings. Before coming to Cloudflare, Syona was at Intel, where she started her career in CPU design, and held several different roles in hardware, product and business development in Cloud Computing.
She holds a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin, and a business degree from University of Washington.
