Pankaj Mehra | Professor of Research in Computer Science and Engineering
The Ohio State University

PANKAJ MEHRA is Professor of Research in Computer Science and Engineering department at The Ohio State University. Pankaj's prior academic positions include Visiting and Assistant Professor of CSE at IIT Delhi, Faculty Visitor at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Industry Visitor at Stanford CS Logic Group, and Guest Lecturer and Adjunct Faculty roles at UC Santa Cruz and Wright State University. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE's Transaction on Computers and Internet Computing magazine whre he guest edited 3 special issues on Global Deployment of Data Centers, Cloud Computing, and Context-Aware Computing. Pankaj holds Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he wrote two books about Artificial Neural Networks and their applications while he was a grad student at Beckman Institute. He is Founder and CEO at Elephance Memory, a company that builds software to optimize disaggregated data center memory for data infrastructure and AI applications. Pankaj has held executive positions in the Memory industry since 2013 when he took over as SVP and WW CTO of Fusion-io, later serving as VP and Senior Fellow at both acquirers SanDisk and Western Digital, where he also co-chaired SanDisk Technology Council and led the development of iMemory as founding member of SanDisk CTO Office. Pankaj subsequently led SmartSSD (as VP of Product Planning) and other workload-optimized flash storage products (as VP of Storage Pathfinding) at Samsung, for which he and his team of 10 received Samsung's prestigious R&D Award in 2019. SmartSSD went on to win the CES R&D Innovation Award in 2021. Previously, during his 14 years with Tandem Computers and its acquirers Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, Pankaj was promoted to HP Distinguished Technologist in 2004 for his pioneering work on RDMA-attached persistent memory devices and filesystems. Later, he founded HP Labs Russia and served as its Chief Scientist until 2010, during which time HP Horizon Ventures incubated his knowledge-graph cloud service startup Taxonom.com which listed Bloomber and Lexis-Nexis as its customers. He is also the founder of startups IntelliFabric, Whodini and AwarenaaS, where he invented switch-based virtualization, context engines, and ParquetSSD. Pankaj's international experience spans academia, industry and government. His publications include 3 books and over 100 papers and patents about inventions including Virtual Switch, Compression Enhancing Routing Algorithms, and Mutifabric Topologies. Pankaj is also the owner of Pankaj Mehra Consulting, which since 1995 has done extended strategic consulting assignments, offshore development, and technical due diligence work with Convex/HP, QLogic, Samsung Electronics Device Solutions Americas, VMWare Research, Kioxia Japan, Rambus Labs, and many investment firms. Pankaj received the prestigious Terabyte Sort Trophy from Turing Award winner Jim Gray in 1998, and built category-leading TPC-C clusters using Windows Server. He is an author of InfiniBand specification 1.0 and chaired the Management Working Group in IB Trade Association. He is currently active in OpenCompute Project (OCP) where he has led or co-authored documents aboout Computational Memory Programming, Data-Centric Computing, and Fabric Orchestration and has presented and demonstrated memory device and memory management software innovations at OCP Global Summit on multiple occasions.