Keynote Speakers

---

Sr. Director of Infrastructure

Meta, Norway 

Ola is an engineer and entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience building distributed systems. Ola currently serves as Senior Director of AI Systems at Meta. Previously Ola was SVP Systems at Graphcore, driving their 2nd generation AI systems. Ola came to Graphcore through the acquisition of Skala Technologies, an AI startup he co-founded. Prior to Skala, Ola worked as Chief Architect at Oracle. Ola joined Oracle through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. At Sun, Ola served as Distinguished Engineer, amongst many things responsible for the famous 3456-port Magnum Infiniband Switch now on display in the Computer Museum, Silicon Valley. Prior to Sun Ola was at Dolphin ICS, acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2000. Ola started his career as a research scientist at SINTEF, a Norwegian industrial research organization.

Ola is a recognized industry expert in distributed systems, holds over 48 patents, has published several papers in leading publications, and participated in numerous standardization bodies. Ola holds an MSc degree in Computer Science from University of Oslo in 1994

GM and VP of Optical Systems Division 

Broadcom, USA 

Dr. Near Margalit has held several executive positions in the optical connectivity industry. He founded  Zaffire Inc., a metro DWDM Optical Networking company before moving on to lead Source Photonics as CEO from 2002-2013, growing the company to one of the premier optical transceiver vendors.  He was the CTO and Head of Product Development for Intel's Silicon Photonics for the commercial introduction of Silicon Photonics in 2015-2016.   From 2018 to present he has been with the Optical Systems Division of Broadcom where he is currently the VP and General Manager of the division.  He holds a Ph.D in Optoelectronics from UC Santa Barbara and a B.S. in Applied Physics from CalTech.