Program

Abstract
We are in the middle of a new “intelligence revolution”. From consumer products to enterprise cloud offerings, and even foundational scientific research, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming all aspects of our life. These amazing advances have been made possible by equally impressive innovations in the underlying computing systems powering AI, but the continued pace of growth and change will require even more. In this talk, we will discuss verticallyintegrated optimizations in AI infrastructure that have already birthed a new cottage industry of "unicorns", ranging from physical data centers hardware to software and cloud solutions, and identify the exciting opportunities ahead. We will then look forward to future “centaurs and cyborgs,” symbiotic partnerships between human ingenuity and artificial intelligence, highlighting the opportunities and challenges when we use AI to optimize AI. Co-design and collaboration, across the hardware-software stack, across disciplines, and across communities, will be key to this exciting new future

Bio
Partha Ranganathan is currently a VP, technical Fellow at Google where he is the area technical lead for systems infrastructure driving next-generation computing for the AI-era. Prior to this, he was a HP Fellow and Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he led their research on systems and data centers. Partha has pioneered numerous impactful innovations touching billions of users, including widely-adopted ideas across all mobile and cloud systems: energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneous multi-cores, power-efficient servers, ML and video accelerators, and disaggregated and data-centric data centers. He has published extensively: 150+ papers, including several best paper awards, is the co-author on the popular "Datacenter as a Computer" textbook, and is a co-inventor on 125+ patents. He has been recognized with numerous awards and press features. He has been named a top-15 enterprise technology rock star by Business Insider, one of the top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Tech Review, and is a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, Rice University’s Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award, and the IIT Madras Distinguished Alumni award. He is also a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE. Fun fact: Partha is one of few computer scientists to also have an Emmy award!

Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm, enabling new applications, intensifying GPU shortages, and raising concerns about the accuracy of their outputs. In this talk, I will present several projects I have worked on to address these challenges. Specifically, I will focus on Ray, a distributed framework for scaling AI workloads, vLLM and SGLang, two high-throughput inference engines for LLMs, and LMArena, a platform for accurate LLM benchmarking. I will conclude with key lessons learned and outline directions for future research.

Bio
Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department and holds the Xu Bao Chancellor Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Director of the Sky Computing Lab and the Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. His current research focuses on AI systems and cloud computing, and his work includes numerous open-source projects such as vLLM, SGLang, Chatbot Arena, SkyPilot, Ray, and Apache Spark. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy, and an ACM Fellow. He has also cofounded several companies, including LMArena (2025), Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013), and Conviva (2006).

Abstract
Behind the scenes, mainframes (IBM Z) and IBM Power Systems fuel banking, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, transportation, and many other critical industries. While we each touch multiple silicon-based systems daily, enterprise systems are the ones you never see, but always rely on. In this talk, we’ll look inside these systems, discuss the silicon technology, microarchitecture, and system elements which come together to deliver eight nines of system-level resiliency (99.999999% uptime). We’ll explore the changes in workloads on these systems, and discuss how new drivers like AI for fraud detection, AI for insurance claims processing, and AI-driven system operations are changing enterprise requirements.

Bio
Hillery is the General Manager for IBM Power and serves as IBM Infrastructure CTO. In this role, she is focused on setting the global strategy for both Power and Infrastructure Platform in addition to driving crossfunctional innovation and growth across IBM’s Infrastructure portfolio which includes IBM zSystems, Power, Storage, TLS and IBM Cloud. In her previous roles as the GM, Industry Clouds and CTO of IBM Cloud, she led the business and technical strategy for IBM’s industrycontextualized cloud offerings and was responsible for technical strategy for IBM’s public cloud. Prior to this role, she served as Director of Accelerated Cognitive Infrastructure in IBM Research, leading a team doing crossstack (hardware through software) optimization of AI workloads.
Her technical interests have always been interdisciplinary, spanning from silicon technology through system software, and she has served in technical and leadership roles in memory technology, Systems for AI and other areas. Hillery was appointed as an IBM Fellow in 2017, and she is a BS, MS and PhD graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also received the 2024 Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.