Virtual OFA Workshop 2023 Program to Focus on Key Trends Impacting the Future of Networking

/ / Consortium News, Workshops

The Virtual OFA Workshop 2023 – taking place April 11-13 – is just a couple of weeks away and the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is really excited at how the program has come together.

This year’s workshop will feature two keynotes covering major industry trends that will impact the future of the networking ecosystem.

Kicking off Day 1 will be a talk on “The Next Decade of Networking: Challenges and Opportunities” from Aditya Akella, Regents Chair Professor of Computer Science at University of Texas at Austin. Aditya’s research spans computer systems and networking, focusing on programmable networks, formal methods in systems, and systems for big data and machine learning. His work has influenced the infrastructure of some of the world’s largest online service providers.

The keynote will cover the rapid transformations that networking technology has undergone over the past 1-2 decades, including breakthroughs such as software-defined networking, network virtualization, and programmable switches which have led to great improvement in edge, cloud, and data center infrastructure and applications. Networking continues to evolve rapidly, with transformative advances across the stack ushering in a new breed of applications with extreme demands running at the edge, the cloud, or across geo-distributed data centers. In this talk, Aditya will describe some of these emerging advances – spanning network transport and congestion control, network switches and interface cards (NICs), and network software stacks – outlining the opportunities they offer and the open challenges that must be overcome to effectively support future applications.

On Day 2, Debendra Das Sharma will return as a keynote speaker to cover “UCIe: Building an Open Ecosystem of Chiplets for On-package Innovations.” Debendra is a Senior Fellow at Intel and the Chair of the newly formed UCIe Consortium.

UCIe™ (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express™) is an open specification that defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, enabling an open chiplet ecosystem and ubiquitous interconnect at the package level. UCIe technology addresses the projected growing demands of compute, memory, storage, and connectivity across the entire compute continuum spanning cloud, edge, enterprise, 5G, automotive, high-performance computing, and hand-held segments. UCIe provides the ability to package dies from different sources, including different fabs, different designs, and different packaging technologies. This presentation will introduce features in the UCIe 1.0 specification and explore how UCIe will enable users to easily mix and match chiplet components from a multi-vendor ecosystem for System-on-Chip (SoC) construction, including customized SoC.

In addition to the keynotes, this year’s workshop will offer 19 technical sessions focused on advanced network technology, innovative networking approaches, and the open community. Visit the Agenda and Abstracts page for a detailed look at our published program.

As a reminder, registration is now open for the OFA Virtual Workshop 2023 and is free of charge for all attendees. Interested attendees can register using the links below:

Date/Time

Registration Links

Tuesday, April 11
8:00AM-12:30PM PT

https://bit.ly/OFAWS23-Day1

Wednesday, April 12
8:00AM-12:30PM PT

https://bit.ly/OFAWS23-Day2

Thursday, April 13
8:00AM-1:00PM PT

https://bit.ly/OFAWS23-Day3

Contact press@openfabrics.org with any questions.