Gilad Shainer serves as senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. Gilad chairs the HPC-AI Advisory Council, is the president of UCF and CCIX consortia, a member of the InfiniBand Trade Association, and a contributor to the PCISIG PCI-X and PCIe specifications. He holds multiple patents in high-speed networking and received the 2015 R&D100 award for his contribution to the CORE-Direct In-Network Computing technology and the 2019 R&D100 award for his contribution to the Unified Communication X technology. Gilad holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel.

Nidhi Chappell leads the Workload Optimized Compute for Azure. Under her leadership, the team is responsible for transitional (on-prem workloads that are now adapting to cloud) and more modern workloads (cloud native) that have very specific infrastructure requirements outside of our general-purpose fleet. The team is responsible for Azure offerings for Confidential Computing, SAP, HPC, and AI. Prior to joining Microsoft, Nidhi was at Intel for 12 years where she led the development of AI product strategy and Intel’s efforts around converged workflow for HPC and AI. Nidhi holds an M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Wisconsin, an MBA from the University of Michigan, and a U.S. patent on branch prediction.

Alan Weckel is a recognized data center networking, enterprise, and cloud market expert. He publishes quarterly market share and forecast data for switching and cloud markets. His research spans verticals, use cases, and speed transitions. Alan is pioneering research in areas such as AI networking, white box, data center switching, and merchant silicon.