Dheeraj Skandakumar Nair | Senior Hardware Engineer
Oracle
Dheeraj is a Senior Engineer at Oracle, spearheading the qualification and optimization of high-performance SSDs for Oracle’s global cloud and AI/ML infrastructure. He drives technical evaluations, benchmarking, and test automation, ensuring hardware compatibility with demanding workloads and accelerating product readiness. As the key technical liaison to SSD vendors, he manages end-to-end validation, failure analysis, and collaborative design improvements, directly shaping the future of Oracle’s storage solutions.
Previously at SanDisk, Dheeraj specialized in embedded systems and SSD debugging, leading projects such as PCIe Gen5 Debug Infrastructure and implementing advanced communication protocols like I3C. He is recognized for improving power management IC validation and streamlining test processes. Dheeraj holds a Master’s in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University and has published multiple papers in machine learning.
Appearances:
Future of Memory and Storage - Day 3 @ 10:10
Pipeline-Aware Flash Benchmarking: How Real AI Workloads Redefine SSD Evaluation
Artificial intelligence and machine learning pipelines impose diverse, demanding storage access patterns that traditional SSD benchmarks fail to capture. We present a trace-driven, end-to-end benchmarking methodology reflecting true AI/ML workloads: from random-read data loading and checkpointing to burst feature writes and high-concurrency inference. By reconstructing empirical I/O traces as synthetic fio workloads, we benchmark multiple NVMe SSDs across every ML pipeline stage. Our findings reveal that no single device is best for all tasks drive performance varies widely by workload, exposing differences in concurrency handling, write endurance, and real-world latency. We offer practical insights and recommendations for AI practitioners, infrastructure engineers, and SSD vendors, enabling evidence-based storage selection and system tuning for modern ML applications.
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