Leadership

OCP Future Technologies Initiative Chair:

Allan Smith

Founding Chair for OCP/FTI. Builds pipelines of talent and ideas to focus on next-gen problem sets facing the OCP industry. Allan is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy and ESC Toulouse. He serves as an advisor for several venture and technology areas, including Climate Tech. Formerly, he was the first Lab Manager for Area 404, Facebook’s hardware prototyping laboratory, and Program Director for the Rapid Response Space Works efforts with NASA Ames Research Center.

Email: allan.smith@opencompute.org

OCP Future Technolgoies Symposium Chair:

Lesya Dymyd

Primary lead for the successful execution of an event, including communication with academic institutions and leading the Program Committee. Lesya holds a doctorate degree from the University of Strasbourg and was a visiting researcher at ETH Zurich. She is currently a strategic innovation engineer at 2CRSi. Before joining 2CRSi, Lesya worked for a European NGO and several private companies.

Email: lesya.dymyd@opencompute.org

Chris Pfistner joined Avicena in 2021 as Vice President of Sales & Marketing. Chris has over 25 years of experience in Sales, Marketing, Product Line Management, and Business Development in the global fiber optic module and systems market. Prior to Avicena, Chris held executive positions with Jabil Photonics, Lumentum, Finisar/II-VI/Coherent, NeoPhotonics, Terawave, Advanced Fibre Communications and Pirelli Optical Systems. Chris holds Ph.D. and MS and BS degrees in Applied Physics from the University of Berne, Switzerland.

Gary Grider is the Leader of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos’ HPC Division operates one of the largest governmental supercomputing centers in the world focused on US National Security for the US/DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. As Division Leader, Gary is responsible for all aspects of High Performance Computing technologies and deployment at Los Alamos. Additionally, Gary is responsible for managing the R&D portfolio for keeping the new technology pipeline full to provide solutions to problems in the Lab’s HPC environment, through funding of university and industry partners. Gary has 30 granted patents in the data high performance data management area and has been working in HPC and HPC related storage since 1984.

Rich is the Managing Director at Interact, a world leading environmental consultancy utilizing circular economy machine learning software, and Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Engineering at London South Bank University (LSBU). His research and development focus are hardware energy efficiency and the environmental and economic impacts of IT hardware during creation, use and disposal. He is a firm believer in the circular economy and sustainable solutions for IT hardware. He has contributed to the UK’s Industrial Strategy, European Legislation (EcoDesign Directive, EU taxonomy on Energy Efficiency) and his research has been published in internationally renowned academic journals (IEEE, Elsevier), conferences (LCM, GECOST) and anthologies.

Bernard is a senior telecommunications and business strategy professional with more than 20 years of global experience in telecommunication and data communications arena especially in the field of optical fiber communications. He is currently the Director of Technology and Innovation at SENKO Advanced Components. He started his career in 2003 with Telekom Malaysia R&D as the Head of Photonic Network Research and then as the Head of Innovation and Communications. Bernard then joined the parent company, Telekom Malaysia (TM) in 2010 as the Assistant General Manager at the Group Business Strategy Division. Bernard is currently an Expert at the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), a Chartered Engineer (CEng) accredited by the Engineering Council of UK, and is also a Registered Communications Distribution Designer (RCDD).

Nichole Hanus, Ph.D., is a Project Scientist in the Electricity Markets and Policy Department at LBNL and a co-lead of the Center of Expertise for Energy Efficiency in Data Centers. Nichole conducts research aimed at improving electricity grid resiliency and reliability and increasing data center energy efficiency. Her work is informed by her background in mechanical engineering, behavioral decision sciences, and public policy. Nichole holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Dayton.

James W. Stewart has over 30 years of experience developing photonic hardware for optical communications. Currently, he works at Meta supporting the development of optical networking hardware for their hyper-scale data centers.  James has been granted over 25 US patents and has authored/co-authored numerous publications for conferences and journals on optical communication subsystems.

Manisha Gajbe has been with Intel for the last 7 years. Currently, she is with Intel's Data Center Group for and is focusing on the Data Analysis/diagnostic strategy for At-Scale Customers, and also supports At-Scale Technologies. Before that she was part of the Design and Engineering Group as OS Content Technical Lead and was responsible for the technical ownership and strategic decision-making of OS content across market segments in Mfg. Prior to joining Intel, she worked 12+ years in HPC working on optimization and analysis of scientific applications, system, and application benchmarks with various high speed and low latency interconnects, mathematical libraries and tools.  During this period, she worked with IBM TJ Watson Research Center and Software Labs, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Oak Ridge National Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Center for Development of Advanced Computing (India). She has authored more than 20 publications, and served as technical program, peer-review, and conference committee member for various international conferences along with internal conferences.

Siamak Tavallaei is currently the Chief Systems Architect at Google Systems Infrastructure where he drives the architecture and productization of CXL-enabled solutions. His current focus is the system optimization for large-scale, mega-data centers for general-purpose and tightly-connected, accelerated machines built on co-designed hardware, software, security and management. In 2016, he joined OCP as a co-lead of Server Project and now is the Incubation Committee (IC) member where he drives open-sourced modular design concepts for integrated hardware/software solutions (DC-MHS and DC-stack). He joined CXL effort as a founding member and co-chair of Technical Task Force (TTF) and is currently the CXL president. His experiences as Chief Systems Architect at Google, Principal Architect at Microsoft Azure's Hardware Architecture team, Distinguished Technologies at HP, and Principal Member Technical Staff at Compaq along with his contributions to industry collaborations  such as EISA, PCI, InfiniBand, and PCIe give Siamak a broad understanding of requirements and solutions for the Enterprise, Hyperscale, and Edge data centers for industry-wide initiatives.