Stephen Bates | Fellow, AI Storage and Comms Software and Architecture
AMD

Stephen Bates is an Fellow in the AI Business Unit at AMD, where he leads work on communication and storage architectures and associated software for AI and data-centric systems. He is a recognized expert in high-performance technologies including NVMe, RDMA, TCP/IP, and non-volatile memory, with deep experience developing complex storage and communication solutions such as NVMe controllers and PCIe switching fabrics. Stephen thrives at the intersection of hardware and software, bridging architectural innovation with practical implementation. He is an active contributor to the Linux kernel and other open-source projects that advance system performance and scalability. Prior to AMD, Stephen served as Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Alberta. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Appearances:

Future of Memory and Storage - Day 3 @ 09:45

Panel Discuss - Storage in Accelerator-Centric Architectures

Domain-specific accelerators such as GPU, TPUs, xPUs already dominate the servers being deployed in hyperscale AI factories. This has posed a sea change in hardware and software, from infrastructure and architecture to deployed applications.

In the past few of years, we have seen different approaches to incorporate storage into these new AI-centric architectures. Some focused on maintaining current applications and leveraging peer-to-peer capabilities between accelerators and SSDs (e.g.,GPU-Direct Storage), and some aiming at re-designing the I/O path, with accelerators directly issuing low level NVMe Commands (e.g., Nvidia's StorageNext/SCADA initiative, SNIA's Storge.ai).

In this panel, we will cover the SOTA on how storage is to evolve in accelerator-centric architectures. Here, we will hear from the experts in the frontline about new advancements on both the hardware and the ecosystem side, and we will have the opportunity to hear their perspectives on questions from both moderators and the audience.

Moderator: Javier Gonzalez, Principal Engineer | Head of Open-Ecosystem, Samsung Electronics